for
strength to meet his present--because he dreaded what we would find at
the end of our work on these dusty books, the last grim figure in
dollars and cents that would stand there as the result of his life, as
the stepping-stone for Sue's and mine. And that was why he wanted me
here, this was his way of telling me the story of his business
life--before I saw what lay at the end. And as in our work that story
unfolded, though at times it cast its spell on me hard, revealing what a
man he had been, there were other times when from somewhere deep inside
of me a small selfish voice would ask:

"What is left? How much has he saved from the wreck? What is this going
to mean to my life?"

In the ledgers his story was still alive. Yellow and dusty as they were,
for me day by day they revivified that still odorous old warehouse until
I saw it as it had been, a huge dim caravansary for the curious products
of all the earth. And that trick of feeling a man, which I had learned
in Paris, made me keenly sensitive now to this lonely old stranger by my
side with whom I was becoming acquainted. I could feel the pull of these
books upon him, pulling him out of his cramped old age back to his glad
boundless youth. How suddenly spacious they became as he slowly turned
the pages. Palm oil from Africa, cotton from Bombay, coffee from Arabia,
pepper from Sumatra. Turn the page. Ivory from Zanzibar, salt from Cadiz
and wines from Bordeaux. Turn the page. Whale oil from the Arctic, iron
from the Baltic, tortoise shell from the Fiji Islands. Turn the page!
India silks and rugs and shawls, indigo, spices! Turn the page!

I began to see the sails speed out along those starlit ocean roads. I
began to feel the forces that had shaped my father's life. And little by
little I saw in those days what not even my mother had understood, that
in my father's business life there had been more than dollars, that what
to us had seemed only a hobby, a dull obstinate fixed idea, had been for
him a glorious vision--the white sails of American clippers dotting all
the seven seas.

So they were in the late Fifties, when leaving the farm in Illinois he
came at sixteen to New York and found a job as time clerk in one of the
ship yards along the East River. They are all gone now, but then they
were humming and teeming with work. And my young father was deeply
excited. He told me of his first day here, when he stood on the deck of
a ferry and watched three great