3. My own
particular water-sulky, a "skeleton" or "shell" race-boat, twenty-
two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull with ten-
foot sculls,--alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him
out, if he doesn't mind what he is about. In this I glide around
the Back Bay, down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and
Watertown, up the Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of
steamboats which leave a swell after them delightful to rock upon;
I linger under the bridges,--those "caterpillar bridges," as my
brother professor so happily called them; rub against the black
sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the overhanging stern
of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard, where the
sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,--just as if I should hurt her
by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the
water gets clear and the air smells of the ocean,--till all at once
I remember, that, if a west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall
drift along past the islands, out of sight of the dear old State-
house,--plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting at home, but no
chair drawn up at the table,--all the dear people waiting, waiting,
waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into the great
desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don't want my
wreck to be washed up on one of the beaches in company with
devil's-aprons, bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached crab-
shells, I turn about and flap my long narrow wings for home.
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