The life of our own fishermen and pilots remains active, in its way, all winter; and coasting vessels come and go in the open harbor every day. The only schooner that is not so employed is, to my eye, more attractive than any of them; it is our sole winter guest, this year, of all the graceful flotilla of yachts that helped to make our summer moonlights so charming. While Europe seems in such ecstasy over the ocean yacht-race, there lies at anchor, stripped and dismantled, a vessel which was excluded from the match, it is said, simply because neither of the three competitors would have had a chance against her. I like to look across the harbor at the graceful proportions of this uncrowned victor in the race she never ran; and to my eye her laurels are the most attractive. She seems a fit emblem of the genius that waits, while talent merely wins. "Let me know," said that fine, but unappreciated thinker, Brownlee Brown,--"let me know what chances a man has passed in contempt; not what he has made, but what he has refused to make, reserving himself for higher ends." All out-door work in winter has a cheerful look, from the triumph of caloric it implies; but I know none in which man seems to revert more to the lower modes of being than in searching for seaclams. One may sometimes observe a dozen men employed in this way, on one of our beaches, while the cold wind blows keenly off shore, and the spray drifts back like snow over the green and sluggish surge. The men pace in and out with the wave, going steadily to and fro like a pendulum, ankle-deep in the chilly brine, their steps quickened by hope or slackening with despair. Where the maidens and children sport and shout in summer, there in winter these heavy figures succeed. To them the lovely crest of the emerald billow is but a chariot for clams, and is valueless if it comes in empty. Really, the position of the clam is the more dignified, since he moves only with the wave, and the immortal being in fish-boots wades for him.