en who went to college, and
one of that army sent out from college as school teachers all over the
land. She had taught school in frontier hamlets far out West, homesick
she had looked back on the old college town in New England, and those
ten years of her life out West had been bare and hard, an exile. At last
she had secured a position in an expensive girls' school in New York,
and from there a few years later she had married my father. I think they
had been happy at first, I think that his work with the ships had seemed
to her a gateway leading out to Europe, to all the very "finest" things.
But later, as he set his whole mind upon his warehouse worries, upon his
fight for Yankee ships, a navy, subsidies, tariffs, and shut out all
thought of travel, culture, friends, all but the bare, ugly business of
life--my mother had rebelled against this, had come to hate his harbor,
and had determinedly set herself to help me get what she had missed.

I don't mean that she babied me. She was too good a teacher for that. I
mean she steered me through hard work away from what she saw in the
harbor up toward what she felt was fine. She began when I was very
little giving me daily lessons at home in the brief time she had to
spare from her house and charity work. She made me study and she studied
me. My mother, sooner or later, seemed to find out all I did or felt.

Often I would hold stubbornly back. While I was going with Sam to the
docks I never once gave her a hint of my rovings. It was not until two
years after that drunken woman disaster that I suddenly told my mother
about it. I remember then she did not chide. Instead she caught the
chance to draw out of me all I had learned from the harbor. I talked to
her long that night, but she said little in reply. I can vividly
remember, though, how she came to me a few days later and placed a "book
for young men" in my hands.

"You are only twelve," she said. "It's a pity. But after what you have
seen, my son, it is better that you know."

She did this twenty years ago. It was far in advance of what most
parents did then or are doing even now for their children. And it threw
a flood of light into the darkest place in my mind, swept away endless
forebodings, secret broodings over what until then had seemed to me the
ugliest, the dirtiest, the most frightening thing I had found in life.

"When you meet anything ugly or bad," she told me, "I don't want you to
turn away at once, I wa