Contrary to her own expectation, Julia had not been uncomfortable on this her first trip on a sail-boat. In the society of her friends, too, she had forgotten half her fears. Nevertheless, had anyone asked her to tell the exact truth, she would have confessed that she would just a little rather be on dry land than on water.
How different it was with Amy! With her veil tied tightly over her hair, with a cape that the boys brought up from the cabin thrown over her shoulders, sitting on the floor of the deck with her back braced against the cabin, she enjoyed every minute. This was something that she had never hoped to enjoy, to have a sail in a real yacht—and she might have added “with real people,” so seldom had it been her good fortune to have the society of young persons of her own age.
There was certainly a dreamy look in Amy’s eyes as she sat there, and Fritz, noticing it, as he passed her once, leaned over and whispered,—
“Writing a poem, Amy?”
At this Amy reddened, for Fritz had come pretty near the truth. If she was not actually composing a poem, she was planning one. She was thinking that there was almost no other object so beautiful as the sea:—
“The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
Without a mark, without a bound,
It runneth the earth’s wide region round.
It plays with the clouds, it mocks the skies,—
Or like a cradled creature lies.”
Fritz sometimes said that Amy had a quotation ready for every occasion, and it was certainly true that she could
