But the Sound! the Sound! Oh! how many delightful reminiscences does the name bring to my recollection. The Sound! with its white sand banks, and its wooded shores—its far broad bosom, covered with fleets of sails scudding along in the swift breeze in the open day, and its dark waves rolling and sweeping in whole streams of phosphorescent fire from their plunging bows as they dash through it in the darkness of midnight. The Sound! redolent with military story. The Sound! overflowing with supernatural legend and antiquated history. Oh! reader, if you had been cruising along its shores from infancy, as I have, if you had grown up among its legends, and luxuriated in its wild associations,—if you had spent whole days on its broad sand beaches, watching the gulls as they sailed above you, or the snipe as they ran along on the smooth hard flats,—if you had lain on the white frozen snows on its shore in the still nights of mid-winter, your gun by your side, gazing till your soul was lost in the blue spangled vault, as it hung in serene and tranquil grandeur above you, your mind, in unconscious adoration, breathing whole volumes of gratitude and admiration to the great God that gave you faculties to enjoy its sublimity; and in the stillness, unbroken save by the cry of the loon as he raised himself from the smooth water, seen in every sail moving in silence between you and the horizon the “Phantom Ship,” or some daring bucaneer, and in every distant splash heard a deed of darkness and mystery, then could you enter into my feelings.