nous. They were born into orderly nurseries; they were graduated
from the vicissitudes of teething and mumps into orderly, peaceful
adolescence. They invariably married the most suitable damsel of their
own class, and they passed from an orderly old age through an orderly
churchyard into a heaven which the imagination of their surviving kin
peopled with orderly ranks of angels, playing gilt harps in perfect
accord. Their artistic ideals were bounded by _Coronation_ and the
pictures in _The New England Primer_ and _Godey_. Blackberry shrub, to
their minds, was the medium of riotous dissipation.

Under such fostering conditions, ancestral traits strengthened from
generation to generation, until the race of Puritan Thayers culminated
in one Cotton Mather who was born in the early decades of the last
century, a grim deacon, a shrewd lawyer, and the owner of two or three
ships which sailed from his own seaport town. Shrewd as he was, however,
his logic failed him at one point. When his first child, Cotton Mather
Thayer, was a tiny boy, the youngster was allowed and even invited to
toddle about the wharves, clinging to the paternal thumb. On the other
hand, when the boy Cotton was fourteen, he received a round dozen of
canings for lounging about among the shipping. The thirteenth caning was
one too many. It was more severe than the others, and it cracked the
long-strained situation. The caning occurred in his father's office,
after hours, one June night. The _Thankful_ was booked to sail, the next
morning at eight. When, at eight-ten, it slipped down the harbor, it
bore away as cabin-boy and general drudge the stiff and sore, but
unrepentant sinner, Cotton Mather Thayer, age fourteen.

His later adventures have little concern with the story of his son's
life. He sailed over many seas, he visited many lands, mellowing by
contact with many peoples the unyielding temper of his race. The
possibility of failure never once entered into his mind. The Thayers
always had succeeded, for they always had worked. In consequence, he
took it quite as a matter of course that, at twenty-three, he should be
commander of the _Presidenta_, stationed in the Baltic for a year of
chilly inaction. St. Petersburg was near, and St. Petersburg, as the
young commander found, held for him the focal point of the world, in the
person of the pretty daughter of one of the court musicians. Twelve
years later, while the _Presidenta_ was stationed in the Medite