clippers go out with the tide, bound for
Calcutta. There were pictures of these vessels on the walls of his
office, stately East Indiamen bearing such names as _Star of Empire_,
_Daniel Webster_, _Ocean Monarch_, _Flying Cloud_--ships known in every
port of the world for their speed. He told how a British vessel, her
topsails reefed in a gale of wind, would see a white tower of swelling
canvas come out of the spray behind her, come booming, staggering,
plunging by--a Yankee clipper under royals. Press of sail? No other
nation knew what it meant! Our owners took big chances, it was no trade
for nervous men!

He found a harbor that welcomed young men, where cabin boys rose to be
captains, and clerks became owners of hundreds of ships. To work! To
rise! To own yards like these, build ships like these and send them
rushing on their courses out to all parts of the ocean world! This had
been his vision, at the time when it was bright and clear. And as now he
made me feel it, the crude vital force that had been in his dream poured
into me deep, made me feel how shut in and one-sided had been my own
vision and standards of life, gave me that profound surprise which many
sons, I suppose, never have:

"My father was once young like me--wiry, straight and tough like me, and
as full of dreams of the things he would do."

But then had come the Civil War. Although only nineteen when the war
broke out, he was already the head clerk in his office. "But like every
other young fool those days," he said, "I was caught by the noise of a
brass band!" Down South as a commissary clerk he found himself a tiny
pawn in that gigantic game of graft which made fat fortunes in the North
and cost tens of thousands of soldiers their lives. He himself took
typhoid, and when the war was over he returned to New York, weak,
penniless, to find his old work gone.

"For the war," he said, "had busted American shipping sky high. Even
before it began it had made the South so bitter that just for the sake
of attacking the North the Solid South in congress had joined the damn
fool Farmer West and attacked our mail subventions. 'No more of the
nation's money,' they said, 'for ship subsidies for New York and New
England!' And so all government protection of our shipping was
withdrawn. And when the war ended, with forty per cent of our ships
grabbed, sunk or sold, it was ruination to build any more, for the
British and German governments were pouring millions