And so they glided down the beautiful Clyde, the breeze freshening about them, as hills began to rise black in the moonlight, and little towns to glimmer on the water’s edge. The mother and the sons walked about the deck together, talking earnestly, and when the vessel rose upon the bigger waves, as they stole out to sea, and every thing but the water and the sky, and the moonlight, gradually sank out of sight, the Mistress, with a little thrill of danger and adventure at her heart, forgot for the moment how, presently, she should return alone by the same road, and almost could suppose that she was setting out with Huntley. The fancy restored her to herself: she was not much of an advice giver. Her very cautions and counsels, perhaps, were arbitrary and slightly impatient, like her nature; but she was their true mother, heart and soul; and the lads did not forget for long years after what the Mistress said as she paced about the deck between them, with a firm, yet sometimes uncertain foot, as the midnight glided into morning, and the river disappeared in the bigger waters of the sea. CHAPTER XXIII. The voyage, as it happened, was a very favorable one--even the Mistress’s inland terrors were scarcely aroused by the swell of that summer sea; and Huntley himself, though his ideas expanded to a much longer journey, unconsciously took it as a good omen that his first night at sea should be so calm and fair. They came into the great seaport late on another summer evening. It was not nearly so extensive then as it is now, but still the masts were in forests, the ships in navies; and their inexperienced eyes, unenlightened by the hasty and darkling glimpse of the Clyde, and knowing nothing greater or busier than the Forth, with its great bosom diversified by an island and a sail, the one scarcely more plentiful than the other, opened wide with amazement at the fleet of vessels in the Mersey. Insensibly to herself, the Mistress drew a certain comfort from the fact, as the Glasgow steamer went gliding up the river, in the late summer sunset. Ships were moored in the deep calm and shadow of the banks; ships were coming and going in the midwaters of the river, and lines of spars and masts, indistinguishable and without number, fringed the whole water edge, from which the smoke of the town, reddened by a last ray of sunshine, rose inland, out of sight, in a great overhanging cloud. The sight of such a throng brought a momentary comfort to the heart of Huntley’s mother. The very sea, it almost seemed, could not be so lonely, when all these big wayfarers, and thousands more, were tracking its waters day by day.