CHAPTER XLI.
IRELAND.
"You'd better call your master up," said the skipper to Mickey Free, on the second evening after our departure from Bristol; "he said he'd like to have a look at the coast." The words were overheard by me, as I lay between sleeping and waking in the cabin of the packet, and without waiting for a second invitation, I rushed upon deck.

The sun was setting, and one vast surface of yellow golden light played upon the water, as it rippled beneath a gentle gale.

The white foam curled at our prow, and the rushing sound told the speed we were going at.
The little craft was staggering under every sheet of her canvas, and her spars creaked as her white sails bent before the breeze.

Before us, but to my landsman's eyes scarcely perceptible, were the ill-defined outlines of cloudy darkness they called land, and which I continued to gaze at with a strange sense of interest, while I heard the names of certain well-known headlands assigned to apparently mere masses of fog-bank and vapor.
He who has never been separated in early years, while yet the budding affections of his heart are tender shoots, from the land of his birth and of his home, knows nothing of the throng of sensations that crowd upon him as he nears the shore of his country.

The names, familiar as household words, come with a train of long-buried thoughts; the feeling of attachment to all we call our own--that patriotism of the heart--stirs strongly within him, as the mingled thrills of hope and fear alternately move him to joy or sadness.
Hard as are the worldly struggles between the daily cares of him who carves out his own career and fortune, yet he has never experienced the darkest poverty of fate who has not felt what it is to be a wanderer, without a country to lay claim to.