Joseph A Altsheler

The Scouts of Stonewall Joseph A Altsheler

Childish as we may think those terrors of the long by-gone ages they really were much the same as the emotions which we may any day see evinced by an inland-born novice who for the first time looks upon the sea. And not merely man, but all animals, experience the same surprise, the same shock, when suddenly brought face to face with the mighty water-world. Even at ebb tide, when the water so gently and so lovingly caresses, as it leaves, that shore to which it shall so boisterously return, your horse quite evidently likes it not; he shudders, balks, snorts, -and very often bolts from it at the very top of his speed. Your dog recoils, howls, and, after his own canine fashion, returns insult for insult to the waves that annoy and terrify him; he never concludes a real peace with the element which to him seems less doubtful than positively hostile. A certain traveller tells us that the Kamtschatkan dogs, accustomed as they are to the sight of the sea, are nevertheless irritated and alarmed by it. During the long nights immense troops of them howl back to the howling waves that break, in their furious might, upon the iron-bound shores of the northern ocean