I well remember the day I first began to wonder at the vastness of the world. It was upon an occasion when my father and Ol' Peter took me for a sail in a _tremendous_ boat that they afterwards hauled up on the beach out at the mouth of the river--this is very clear in my mind--and the next morning after this excursion I went down with my mother to the end of the little wharf, and lo and behold! a great ship was lying at anchor in the broad stretch of water beyond the reedy point of land. My mother was crying softly, and my father kissed her, and me, too, over and over again. Then he stepped in a boat rowed by dark men with beards on their faces, and put off to the ship, spread her sails like a great bird and swept out into the bay. When she had gone beyond the point, and we could no longer see a tall figure standing on the after-deck waving his hat, my mother burst out crying harder than ever, and we went back to the house. I never saw my father again. I call him "my father," in thus looking back at the great spring-time, because I always think of him as such, and because I bear his name. Long years afterwards I learned much that this story will tell, if it goes on to the end, but it is now too early to indulge in explanations--I must relate things as they come to me. Well, when I was six or seven years of age--when these first days I have touched on were even then but a memory--I began to enjoy life in new ways. I had never a play-mate but the dog, who had grown too old for romping; but my mother would read long and wonderful stories to me in her beautiful low voice, in French, of course, and I, listening, pictured the outside world as something strange and beautiful, and just waiting and yearning for _my_ coming to see it and enjoy it. The ships that sailed up and down the bay, long distances off, were all bound somewhere that only _I_ knew, and my thoughts would follow them to enchanted islands where fairies and beautiful creatures lived, and where wonderful birds sang from the branches of wonderful trees. I had begun to study with my mother about this period. Dull work it often appeared to be, and I dare say many a rebellion had to be put down and many an outbreak silenced, although I can recollect no chastisements. But at last, before I was ten years old, I would take a book, and followed by the sedately plodding Maréchal, seek a shady spot down at the point, where I read myself to sleep often enough. Of course now, by this time, I knew that the name of the river on which our plantation bordered was the Gunpowder, that the blue waters were the waters of Chesapeake Bay, that I lived on the shores of Maryland, and that the ships were bound not to fairy islands (except now and then when I _wanted_ them to be), but to Baltimore and Annapolis and Havre de Grace, and to a dozen other places whose inhabitants sought their living by trading and sailing on the sea.