The Cruise of the Dolphin Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Gloucester, Marblehead, and Newcastle!

Though our strength was nearly spent, we were too cold to sleep.
Once I sunk into a troubled doze, when I seemed to hear Charley
Marden's parting words, only it was the Sea that said them. After
that I threw off the drowsiness whenever it threatened to overcome
me.

Fred Langdon was the earliest to discover a filmy, luminous streak
in the sky, the first glimmering of sunrise.

"Look, it is nearly daybreak!"

While we were following the direction of his finger, a sound of
distant oars fell upon our ears.

We listened breathlessly; and as the dip of the blades became more
audible, we discerned two foggy lights, like will-o'-the-wisps,
floating on the river.

Running down to the water's edge, we hailed the boats with all our
might. The call was heard, for the oars rested a moment in the
row-locks, and then pulled in towards the island.

It was two boats from the town, in the foremost of which we could
now make out the figures of Captain Nutter and Binny Wallace's
father. We shrunk back on seeing him.

"Thank God!" cried Mr. Wallace fervently, as he leaped from the
wherry without waiting for the bow to touch the beach.

But when he saw only three boys standing on the sands, his eye
wandered restlessly about in quest of the fourth; then a deadly
pallor overspread his features.

Our story was soon told. A solemn silence fell upon the crowd of
rough boatmen gathered round, interrupted only by a stifled sob
form one poor old man who stood apart from the rest.

The sea was still running too high for any small boat to venture
out; so it was arranged that the wherry should take us back to
town, leaving the yawl, with a picked crew, to hug the island until
daybreak, and then set forth in search of the Dolphin.

Though it was barely sunrise when we reached town, there were a
great many persons assembled at the landing eager for intelligence
from missing boats. Two picnic parties had started down river the
day before, just previous to the gale, and nothing had been heard
of them. It turned out that the pleasure-seekers saw their danger
in time, and ran ashore on one of the least exposed islands, where
they passed the night. Shortly after our own arrival they appeared
off Rivermouth, much to the joy of their friends, in two shattered,
dismasted boats. 

The excitement over, I was in a forlorn state, physically and
mentally. Captain Nutter put me to bed between hot blankets, and
sent Kitty Collins for the doctor. I was wandering in my mind, and
fancied myself still on Sandpeep Island: now we were building our
brick stove to cook the chowder, and, in my delirium, I laughed
aloud and shouted to my comrades; now the sky darkened, and the
squall struck the island; now I gave orders to Wallace how to
manage the boat, and now I cried because the rain was pouring in on
me through the holes in the tent. Towards evening a high fever set
in, and it was many days before my grandfather deemed it prudent
to tell me that the Dolphin had been found, floating keel upwards,
four miles southeast of Mackerel Reef.

Poor little Binny Wallace! How strange it seemed, when I went to
school again, to see that empty seat in the fifth row! How gloomy
the playground was, lacking the sunshine of his gentle, sensitive
face! One day a folded sheet slipped from my algebra: it was the
last note he ever wrote me. I could not read it for the tears.

What a pang shot across my heart the afternoon it was whispered
through the town that a body had been washed ashore at Grave
Point--the place where we bathed! We bathed there no more! How well
I remember the funeral, and what a piteous sight it was afterwards
to see his familiar name on a small headstone in the Old South
Burying-Ground!

Poor little Binny Wallace! Always the same to me. The rest of us
have grown up into hard, worldly men, fighting the fight of life;
but you are forever young, and gentle, and pure; a part of my own
childhood that time cannot wither; always a little boy, always poor
little Binny Wallace!




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