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- 10072
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:14.842Z
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- structure-extraction-lambda
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- 10004
- text
- CHAPTER L.
HARRY BOLTON AT SEA
As yet I have said nothing about how my friend, Harry, got along as a
sailor.
Poor Harry! a feeling of sadness, never to be comforted, comes over me,
even now when I think of you. For this voyage that you went, but
carried you part of the way to that ocean grave, which has buried you
up with your secrets, and whither no mourning pilgrimage can be made.
But why this gloom at the thought of the dead? And why should we not be
glad? Is it, that we ever think of them as departed from all joy? Is
it, that we believe that indeed they are dead? They revisit us not, the
departed; their voices no more ring in the air; summer may come, but it
is winter with them; and even in our own limbs we feel not the sap that
every spring renews the green life of the trees.
But Harry! you live over again, as I recall your image before me. I see
you, plain and palpable as in life; and can make your existence obvious
to others. Is he, then, dead, of whom this may be said?
But Harry! you are mixed with a thousand strange forms, the centaurs of
fancy; half real and human, half wild and grotesque. Divine imaginings,
like gods, come down to the groves of our Thessalies, and there, in the
embrace of wild, dryad reminiscences, beget the beings that astonish
the world.
But Harry! though your image now roams in my Thessaly groves, it is the
same as of old; and among the droves of mixed beings and centaurs, you
show like a zebra, banding with elks.
And indeed, in his striped Guernsey frock, dark glossy skin and hair,
Harry Bolton, mingling with the Highlander’s crew, looked not unlike
the soft, silken quadruped-creole, that, pursued by wild Bushmen,
bounds through Caffrarian woods.
How they hunted you, Harry, my zebra! those ocean barbarians, those
unimpressible, uncivilized sailors of ours! How they pursued you from
bowsprit to mainmast, and started you out of your every retreat!
Before the day of our sailing, it was known to the seamen that the
girlish youth, whom they daily saw near the sign of the Clipper in
Union-street, would form one of their homeward-bound crew. Accordingly,
they cast upon him many a critical glance; but were not long in
concluding that Harry would prove no very great accession to their
strength; that the hoist of so tender an arm would not tell many
hundred-weight on the maintop-sail halyards. Therefore they disliked
him before they became acquainted with him; and such dislikes, as every
one knows, are the most inveterate, and liable to increase. But even
sailors are not blind to the sacredness that hallows a stranger; and
for a time, abstaining from rudeness, they only maintained toward my
friend a cold and unsympathizing civility.
As for Harry, at first the novelty of the scene filled up his mind; and
the thought of being bound for a distant land, carried with it, as with
every one, a buoyant feeling of undefinable expectation. And though his
money was now gone again, all but a sovereign or two, yet that troubled
him but little, in the first flush of being at sea.
But I was surprised, that one who had certainly seen much of life,
should evince such an incredible ignorance of what was wholly
inadmissible in a person situated as he was. But perhaps his
familiarity with lofty life, only the less qualified him for
understanding the other extreme. Will you believe me, this Bury blade
once came on deck in a brocaded dressing-gown, embroidered slippers,
and tasseled smoking-cap, to stand his morning watch.
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