I wonder whether you have ever seen the sea. If you have, you know it and love it so well that there is no need for me to try to describe it to you. If you have not, if your home has always been in the country among the quiet fields, far away from the sound of the waves as they break upon the strand; or if you have lived all your life in the town, where the streets are full of noise and bustle, and busy folk hurrying to and fro--then I think it would be almost as difficult for me to give you an idea of what the boundless ocean is like, as it was for the kind miner to make his little friend understand all about seas and lakes and rivers, as he talked to him over that poor little pail of water, deep down in the dark mine. Ah! you must see the great ocean-world for yourself; you must sail over the crests of the waves, and learn to swim and dive. If you have never yet been to the seaside, there is indeed a treat in store for you some day, and I should like to be with you when that day comes, and catch a sight of your face, so full of wonder and pleasure. I remember hearing of a little "city sparrow" of a boy who was taken with a great many town children to spend a long summer's day by the seaside. When he first came in sight of the bay, with its bright, dancing waters, and saw the tide rolling in, wave after wave, upon the yellow sands, he gave one long, satisfied look, and then said, "How nice it is to see plenty of anything!" Poor child, these words of his told their own touching tale; he had never, in his parents' home, known what plenty was, and so his first thought about the "great and wide sea" which God had made, was that there was enough of it and to spare--no stint there, at any rate. To another little boy, the first sight of the sea brought this thought, "How great God, who made it, must be!" It is delightful to live, as I did when a child, within sight and sound of the sea; but I suppose it is only those who really live upon the world of waters, sailing away in a swift ship, day after day, for thousands of watery miles, and seeing nothing but the two oceans, "the blue above and the blue below," as that same sailor-song says, who can really know anything of its vastness. How strange it must seem, to be neither a fish nor a bird, and yet to live as it were between sea and sky; each morning finding yourself farther away from land, each night lying down to be "rocked in the cradle of the deep," and to hear the wash of the waves as the boat cuts her way through them, and the sighing of the wind, not through the trees on the lawn, but among the sails and ropes of your floating home!