he Mast_."

Once in a hundred years is a book written that lives not alone for its
own century but which becomes a document for the future centuries. Such
a book is Dana's. When Marryat's and Cooper's sea novels are gone to
dust, stimulating and joyful as they have been to generations of men,
still will remain "Two Years Before the Mast."

Paradoxical as it may seem, Dana's book is the classic of the sea, not
because there was anything extraordinary about Dana, but for the precise
contrary reason that he was just an ordinary, normal man, clear-seeing,
hard-headed, controlled, fitted with adequate education to go about the
work. He brought a trained mind to put down with untroubled vision what
he saw of a certain phase of work-a-day life. There was nothing
brilliant nor fly-away about him. He was not a genius. His heart never
rode his head. He was neither overlorded by sentiment nor hag-ridden by
imagination. Otherwise he might have been guilty of the beautiful
exaggerations in Melville's "Typee" or the imaginative orgies in the
latter's "Moby Dick." It was Dana's cool poise that saved him from being
spread-eagled and flogged when two of his mates were so treated; it was
his lack of abandon that prevented him from taking up permanently with
the sea, that prevented him from seeing more than one poetical spot, and
more than one romantic spot on all the coast of Old California. Yet
these apparent defects were his strength. They enabled him magnificently
to write, and for all time, the picture of the sea-life of his time.

Written close to the middle of the last century, such has been the
revolution worked in man's method of trafficking with the sea, that the
life and conditions described in Dana's book have passed utterly away.
Gone are the crack clippers, the driving captains, the hard-bitten but
efficient foremast hands. Remain only crawling cargo tanks, dirty
tramps, greyhound liners, and a sombre, sordid type of sailing ship. The
only records broken to-day by sailing vessels are those for slowness.
They are no longer built for speed, nor are they manned before the mast
by as sturdy a sailor stock, nor aft the mast are they officered by sail-
carrying captains and driving mates.

Speed is left to the liners, who run the silk, and tea, and spices.
Admiralty courts, boards of trade, and underwriters frown upon driving
and sail-carrying. No more are the free-and-easy, dare-devil days, when
fortunes were mad