This group of
stern-faced men with high peaked hats, who knelt upon the cold deck
and looked out upon a shore which, I could see by their joyless smile
of satisfaction, was rough, and bare, and forbidding. In that soft
afternoon, standing in mournful groups upon the small deck, why did
they seem to me to be seeing the sad shores of wintry New England?
That phantom-ship could not be the May Flower!
I gazed long upon the shifting illusion.
"If I should board this ship," I asked myself, "where should I go?
whom should I meet? what should I see? Is not this the vessel that
shall carry me to my Europe, my foreign countries, my impossible
India, the Atlantis that I have lost?"
As I sat staring at it I could not but wonder whether Bourne had seen
this sail when he looked upon the water? Does he see such sights every
day, because he lives down here? Is it not perhaps a magic yacht of
his; and does he slip off privately after business hours to Venice,
and Spain, and Egypt, perhaps to El Dorado? Does he run races with
Ptolemy, Philopater and Hiero of Syracuse, rare regattas on fabulous
seas?
Why not? He is a rich, man, too, and why should not a New York
merchant do what a Syracuse tyrant and an Egyptian prince did? Has
Bourne's yacht those sumptuous chambers, like Philopater's galley, of
which the greater part was made of split cedar, and of Milesian
cypress; and has he twenty doors put together with beams of
citron-wood, with many ornaments? Has the roof of his cabin a carved
golden face, and is his sail linen with a purple fringe?
"I suppose it is so," I said to myself, as I looked wistfully at the
ship, which began to glimmer and melt in the haze.
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