We all swore that we would never go to sea again;
and when, after gliding into harbor in the night, we looked, one clear
September morning, on the seemingly unnatural green of the grass and
trees of the old North Shore, I said to myself, "This is God's country,
if there ever was one, and I, for one, will never get out of sight of it
again."
But I had tasted fog and brine, and the "landlubber's" lot was too
monotonously tame for me. The next spring saw me on the deck of the same
schooner headed for the Newfoundland Banks, the home of the codfish and
the fog.
A seafaring ancestry and a boyhood spent within sound of the surf
doubtless had much to do with my love of the salt water. My grandfather
was one of six brothers who were sea captains, and our family had clung
to the North Shore of Massachusetts Bay almost since the first white
settler had moored his bark in that vicinity, more than two hundred
years before.
My boyhood home was originally a fishing town, since changed to
manufacturing, and was fragrant with traditions of the sea.
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