lly I searched for a letter.
Still I could feel those anxious eyes.

"Hold on!" I cried. "They've taken it! All they want me to do is to cut
it down!"

"Then do it!" My radiant father snarled. "It ought to be cut to half its
length! That's the way with beginners, a mass of details! Some day maybe
you'll learn to write!"

I smiled happily back. He came suddenly over and gripped my hand.

"My boy, I'm glad, I'm very glad! I'm"--he cleared his throat and went
back to his desk and tried to scowl over what he was doing.

"Dad."

"Huh?"

"They say they'll give me a hundred dollars. Pretty good for one month's
work."

"Huh."

"And they want me to do some more on the harbor. They say it's a new
field. Never been touched."

"Then touch it," he said gruffly. "Leave me alone. I'm busy."

But coming in late after luncheon that day, I found him reading the
editor's letter.

"Boy," he said that evening, "you ought to read Thackeray for style, and
Washington Irving, and see what a whippersnapper you are. Work--work! If
your mother were only alive she could help you!"

And just before bedtime, taking a bottle of beer with my pipe, I caught
his disapproving eye.

"Worst thing you can put in your stomach," he growled. He said this
regularly each night, and added, "Why can't you keep up your health for
your work?"

His own health had improved astonishingly.

"It's the winter air that has done it," he said.

CHAPTER VIII

My work, as my father saw it now, was to write "strong, practical
articles" presenting the respective merits of free ships, ship subsidies
and discriminating tariffs to build up our mercantile marine.

But I was growing tired these days of my father's idea, his miracle and
his endless talk of the past. On walks along the waterfront he would
treat it all like a graveyard. But while he pointed out the tombs I felt
the swift approach of Spring. It was March, and in a crude way of its
own the harbor was expressing the season--in warm, salty breezes, the
odor of fish and the smell of tar on the bottoms of boats being
overhauled for the Summer. Our Italian dockers sang at their work, and
one day the dock was a bright-hued mass of strawberries and early Spring
flowers landed by a boat from the South. Everywhere things seemed
starting--starting like myself.

I had given up my warehouse job, and free at last from that tedious desk
to which I once thought I was tied for years, with two sketches s