THE PLEASURES OF THE DEEP.

Patea Mail, Volume III, Issue 223, 30 May 1877, Page 2

THE PLEASURES OF THE DEEP.

A Detroit boy, after finishing the last chapter of a book called the Pleasures of the Deep, pleaded with his father to let him ship aboard a lake schooner. The old man smiled a grim smile, took the case under consideration, and in a few days the boy was on the rolling deep haying shipped ns a greenhorn on board of a vessel in the lumber trade. He sailed to Saginaw, came down and crossed to Toledo, and next day he appeared in Detroit, lame and stiff, his throat sore, one eye nearly shut, and a feeling of humbleness running all through him. “ What I back again ?” cried the old man, as the boy entered the house. “ Yes, father, I want to saw all the wood for winter, bring in all the coal, clean out the cellar and paint the barn, and you needn’t give me but two meals a day.” “ Don’t you like sailing ?” “ Father, you do not begin to realize anything about it. The captain sailed right along on Sunday, the same as any other day, and I believe he swore even harder. He wouldn’t give me an umbrella when it rained; he made me sit up most the night, and two or three times he called me up at midnight and made me haul on ropes and drag old sails around. There wasn’t a* single night when all of us got off to bed at 9 o’clock, and there was not a day that he didn’t boss us around and break in on us every time we got to reading anything good. I like land, father, and I wish you owned a tarm.”