cypripediums, the most rare wild-ginger, only to be found in one
locality, the walking fern, equally rare, and the long walks in the
pine forests, whose murmuring branches in the west wind fascinated me
more than any other thing in nature.

Perhaps I mingle in recollection the nature-worship of the two
septennates, for of the former was my first rapturous vision of the
open sea, which comes back to me with the memory of the pines. I had
gone with my father and mother to New York on a visit to my eldest
brother, who had just then finished the engines of the steamer
Diamond, which was the first that by her build was enabled to run
through from New York to Albany, past the "overslough" or bar formed
in the Hudson, which prevented the steamers of greater draught from
getting up to the wharf at Albany; and he had profited by her first
trip to visit home again and take us back with him. My brother pointed
out to me the Clermont, Fulton's trial steamer, then disused and
lying at Hoboken, but a cockboat to the Diamond, which was one of the
greatest successes of the day. Machinery fascinated me, being of the
mechanical breed, and I can recall the engines of the boat, which were
of a new type, working horizontally, and so permitting larger engines
in proportion to the draught of the steamer than had been before used.
We all went one day to Coney Island, on the southern shore of Long
Island, since a fashionable bathing place for New York, but then a
solitary stretch of seashore, with a temporary structure where bathers
might get refreshments, and a few bathing boxes. We drove out in my
brother's buggy, and as, at a turn in the road, I caught a glimpse of
the distant sea horizon, I rose in the buggy, shouting, "The sea!
the sea!" and, in an uncontrollable frenzy, caught the whip from my
brother's hand and slashed the horse in wild delirium, unconscious of
what I was doing. The emotion remains uneffaceable after more than