Chapter I: Preface

In these little sketches of a few out of the innumerable multitude of ways in which the sea has spoken to me during my long acquaintance with it, I have tried with ’prentice hand to reproduce for shore-dwellers some of the things it has told me. If I were to stop and consider what other men, freeholders upon the upper slopes of the literary Olympus, have done in the same direction, I should not dare to put forth this little book.

Let my plea be that I have not seen with their eyes nor heard with their ears, but with mine own. This may have some weight with my judges--those who will buy the wares I have to sell.

FRANK T. BULLEN.

_Feb. 1899._