of dollars a year
into the Cunard and the North German Lloyd, and we couldn't compete
against them.

"Still a few of the ship yards kept on, and in one of these at last I
got a job at eight dollars a week. 'The war is over,' we told ourselves,
'and the government can't stay blind forever. They'll see what they've
done, and within a few months they'll go back to the old policy.'
Months? I stuck to that job and waited five years--and still no news
from Washington. 'My boy,' said a doddering Brooklynite, 'the nation has
turned her face westward.'"

Then he left the ship yards and went into a warehouse, where the work
lay mainly in handling cargoes of foreign ships. And starting life all
over again he tried to make up for lost time. The first year he was a
shipping clerk; the second, a bookkeeper; the third, he kept two sets of
books for two different docks, one by day and the other at night. And by
forty he had become a part owner in the old warehouse in which he now
sat grimly reading the record of his life--of a long stubborn losing
fight, for he stuck to his dream of Yankee sails.

He married my mother when he was still strong and full of hope. He must
have been so much kindlier then and brighter, more human to live with.
They bought that pleasant house of ours with its hospitable front door.
My father's doddering Brooklynites seemed wonderful neighbors to his
young wife. And so that front door waited for friends. As the years
dragged on and they did not come, she blamed it all on the harbor. She
saw what it was making him, jealous of every dollar and every hour spent
at home. He worked all day and half the night. It took him into
politics, on countless trips to Washington, and she knew he spent
thousands of dollars there in ways that were by no means "fine." It made
him morose and gloomy, a man of one idea, to be shunned.

And she no more saw behind all this than I did when I was a boy. For his
vision was neither of pirates nor of bringing the heathen to Christ, but
of imports and of exports. He dreamed in terms of battleships and of a
mercantile marine. Each year he watched the chances grow, vast
continents opening up to commerce with hints of such riches as staggered
the mind. He saw the ocean world an arena into which rushed all nations
but ours.

"Everyone but us," he said, "had learned the big lesson--that you can
get nothing on land or sea unless you're ready to fight for it hard!"

He saw other nations ge