f ships, their kind,
their size, the date when they were built, and their owners. Under
this last head he saw some score of times the name "Corvet, Sherrill
and Spearman." There was a separate list of engines and boilers, and
when they had been built and by whom. There was a chronological table
of events during the year upon the lakes. Then he came to a part
headed "Disasters of the Year," and he read some of them; they were
short accounts, drily and unfeelingly put, but his blood thrilled to
these stories of drowning, freezing, blinded men struggling against
storm and ice and water, and conquering or being conquered by them.
Then he came to his father's picture and biography once more and, with
it, to pictures of other lakemen and their biographies. He turned to
the index and looked for Sherrill's name, and then Spearman's; finding
they were not in the book, he read some of the other ones.

There was a strange similarity, he found, in these biographies, among
themselves as well as to that of his father. These men had had, the
most of them, no tradition of seamanship, such as Sherrill had told him
he himself had had. They had been sons of lumbermen, of farmers, of
mill hands, miners, or fishermen. They had been very young for the
most part, when they had heard and answered the call of the lakes--the
ever-swelling, fierce demand of lumber, grain, and ore for outlet; and
they had lived hard; life had been violent, and raw, and brutal to
them. They had sailed ships, and built ships, and owned and lost them;
they had fought against nature and against man to keep their ships, and
to make them profitable, and to get more of them. In the end a few, a
very few comparatively, had survived; by daring, by enterprise, by
taking great chances, they had thrust their heads above those of their
fellows; they had come to own a half dozen, a dozen, perhaps a score of
bottoms, and to have incomes of fifty, of a hundred, of two hundred
thousand dollars a year.

Alan shut the book and sat thoughtful. He felt strongly the immensity,
the power, the grandeur of all this; but he felt also its violence and
its fierceness. What might there not have been in the life of his
father who had fought up and made a way for himself through such things?

The tall clock in the hall struck nine. He got up and went out into
the hall and asked for his hat and coat. When they had been brought
him, he put them on and went out.

The snow had sto