Read it through once

The first ship I was ever in was a sailing vessel. She was twenty-eight days going from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands. But the main reason for this particularly slow passage was, that she got becalmed, and lay in one spot fourteen days in the centre of the Pacific, two thousand miles from land. I hear no sea-songs in this present vessel, but I heard the entire layout in that one. There were a dozen young people—they are pretty old now I reckon—and they used to group themselves on the stern, in the starlight or the moonlight, every evening, and sing sea-songs till after midnight, in that hot, silent, motionless calm. They had no sense of humour, and they always sang ‘Homeward Bound,’ without reflecting that that was practically ridiculous, since they were standing still and not proceeding in any direction at all; and they often followed that song with ‘Are we almost there, are we almost there, said the dying girl as she drew near home?’