should receive commissions
as on the warships there were actual vacancies. In those days, in 1884,
our navy was very small. To-day there is hardly a ship having her full
complement of officers, and the difficulty is not to get rid of those we
have educated, but to get officers to educate. To the many boys who, on
the promise that they would be officers of the navy, had worked for
four years at the Academy and served two years at sea, the act was most
unfair. Out of a class of about ninety, only the first twelve were given
commissions and the remaining eighty turned adrift upon the uncertain
seas of civil life. As a sop, each was given one thousand dollars.

McGiffin was not one of the chosen twelve. In the final examinations on
the list he was well toward the tail. But without having studied
many things, and without remembering the greater part of them, no
one graduates from Annapolis, even last on the list; and with his one
thousand dollars in cash, McGiffin had also this six years of education
at what was then the best naval college in the world. This was his only
asset--his education--and as in his own country it was impossible to
dispose of it, for possible purchasers he looked abroad.

At that time the Tong King war was on between France and China, and he
decided, before it grew rusty, to offer his knowledge to the followers
of the Yellow Dragon. In those days that was a hazard of new fortunes
that meant much more than it does now. To-day the East is as near as San
Francisco; the Japanese-Russian War, our occupation of the Philippines,
the part played by our troops in the Boxer trouble, have made the
affairs of China part of the daily reading of every one. Now, one can
step into a brass bed at Forty-second Street and in four days at the
Coast get into another brass bed, and in twelve more be spinning down
the Bund of Yokohama in a rickshaw. People go to Japan for the winter
months as they used to go to Cairo.

But in 1885 it was no such light undertaking, certainly not for a young
man who had been brought up in the quiet atmosphere of an inland
town, where generations of his family and other families had lived and
intermarried, content with their surroundings.

With very few of his thousand dollars left him, McGiffin arrived in
February, 1885, in San Francisco. From there his letters to his family
give one the picture of a healthy, warm-hearted youth, chiefly anxious
lest his mother and sister should "worry." I