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- roofs; and old anchors and chain-cable piled on the walk. Old-fashioned
coffeehouses, also, much abound in that neighborhood, with sunburnt
sea-captains going in and out, smoking cigars, and talking about
Havanna, London, and Calcutta.
All these my imaginations were wonderfully assisted by certain shadowy
reminiscences of wharves, and warehouses, and shipping, with which a
residence in a seaport during early childhood had supplied me.
Particularly, I remembered standing with my father on the wharf when a
large ship was getting under way, and rounding the head of the pier. I
remembered the _yo heave ho!_ of the sailors, as they just showed their
woolen caps above the high bulwarks. I remembered how I thought of
their crossing the great ocean; and that that very ship, and those very
sailors, so near to me then, would after a time be actually in Europe.
Added to these reminiscences my father, now dead, had several times
crossed the Atlantic on business affairs, for he had been an importer
in Broad-street. And of winter evenings in New York, by the
well-remembered sea-coal fire in old Greenwich-street, he used to tell
my brother and me of the monstrous waves at sea, mountain high; of the
masts bending like twigs; and all about Havre, and Liverpool, and about
going up into the ball of St. Paul’s in London. Indeed, during my early
life, most of my thoughts of the sea were connected with the land; but
with fine old lands, full of mossy cathedrals and churches, and long,
narrow, crooked streets without sidewalks, and lined with strange
houses. And especially I tried hard to think how such places must look
of rainy days and Saturday afternoons; and whether indeed they did have
rainy days and Saturdays there, just as we did here; and whether the
boys went to school there, and studied geography, and wore their shirt
collars turned over, and tied with a black ribbon; and whether their
papas allowed them to wear boots, instead of shoes, which I so much
disliked, for boots looked so manly.
As I grew older my thoughts took a larger flight, and I frequently fell
into long reveries about distant voyages and travels, and thought how
fine it would be, to be able to talk about remote and barbarous
countries; with what reverence and wonder people would regard me, if I
had just returned from the coast of Africa or New Zealand; how dark and
romantic my sunburnt cheeks would look; how I would bring home with me
foreign clothes of a rich fabric and princely make, and wear them up
and down the streets, and how grocers’ boys would turn back their heads
to look at me, as I went by. For I very well remembered staring at a
man myself, who was pointed out to me by my aunt one Sunday in Church,
as the person who had been in Stony Arabia, and passed through strange
adventures there, all of which with my own eyes I had read in the book
which he wrote, an arid-looking book in a pale yellow cover.
“See what big eyes he has,” whispered my aunt, “they got so big,
because when he was almost dead with famishing in the desert, he all at
once caught sight of a date tree, with the ripe fruit hanging on it.”
Upon this, I stared at him till I thought his eyes were really of an
uncommon size, and stuck out from his head like those of a lobster. I
am sure my own eyes must have magnified as I stared. When church was
out, I wanted my aunt to take me along and follow the traveler home.
But she said the constables would take us up, if we did; and so I never
saw this wonderful Arabian traveler again. But he long haunted me; and
several times I dreamt of him, and thought his great eyes were grown
still larger and rounder; and once I had a vision of the date tree.
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