“Oh, dear, if they had caught him!” said I. “Only think!” “Well, they would have hung him; but we should have had another in his place,” said Aunt Lois. “The war wouldn't 'a' stopped.” “Well, 'twas to be as 'twas,” said my grandmother. “The Lord had respect to the prayers of our fathers, and he'd decreed that America should be free.” “Yes,” said Sam: “Parson Badger said in one o' his sermons, that men always was safe when they was goin' in the line o' God's decrees: I guess that are was about it. But, massy! is that are the nine o'clock bell? I must make haste home, or I dun' know what Hetty 'll say to me.” A STUDENT'S SEA STORY. [Illustration: 9303] MONG the pleasantest of my recollections of old Bowdoin is the salt-air flavor of its sea experiences. The site of Brunswick is a sandy plain, on which the college buildings seem to have been dropped for the good old Yankee economic reason of using land for public buildings that could not be used for any thing else. The soil was a fathomless depth of dry, sharp, barren sand, out of whose bosom nothing but pitch-pines and blueberry-bushes emerged, or ever could emerge without superhuman efforts of cultivation. But these sandy plains, these pine forests, were neighbors to the great, lively, musical blue ocean, whose life-giving presence made itself seen, heard, and felt every hour of the day and night. The beautiful peculiarity of the Maine coast, where the sea interpenetrates the land in picturesque fiords and lakes, brought a constant romantic element into the landscape. White-winged ships from India or China came gliding into the forest recesses bringing news from strange lands, and tidings of wild adventure, into secluded farmhouses, that, for the most part, seemed to be dreaming in woodland solitude. In the early days of my college life the shipping interest of Maine gave it an outlook into all the countries of the earth. Ships and ship-building and ship-launching were the drift of the popular thought; and the very minds of the people by this commerce had apparently “Suffered a sea change Into something rare and strange.” There was a quaintness, shrewdness, and vivacity of lonely solitude about these men, (half skipper, half farmer!) that half skip was piquant and enlivening. It was in the auspicious period of approaching Thanksgiving that my chum and I resolved to antedate for a few days our vacation, and take passage on the little sloop “Brilliant,” that lay courtesying and teetering on the bright waters of Maquoit Bay, loading up to make her Thanksgiving trip to Boston.