Sometimes my head almost aches with the variety of my knowledge.

I consider Mr.
Grimshaw the greatest scholar that ever lived, and I don't know which I would rather be--a learned man like him, or a circus rider.
My thoughts revert to this particular spring more frequently than to any other period of my boyhood, for it was marked by an event that left an indelible impression on my memory.

As I pen these pages, I feel that I am writing of something which happened yesterday, so vividly it all comes back to me.
Every Rivermouth boy looks upon the sea as being in some way mixed up with his destiny.

While he is yet a baby lying in his cradle, he hears the dull, far-off boom of the breakers; when he is older, he wanders by the sandy shore, watching the waves that come plunging up the beach like white-maned seahorses, as Thoreau calls them; his eye follows the lessening sail as it fades into the blue horizon, and he burns for the time when he shall stand on the quarter-deck of his own ship, and go sailing proudly across that mysterious waste of waters.
Then the town itself is full of hints and flavors of the sea.

The gables and roofs of the houses facing eastward are covered with red rust, like the flukes of old anchors; a salty smell pervades the air, and dense gray fogs, the very breath of Ocean, periodically creep up into the quiet streets and envelop everything.