m of a ship. If
a full-rigged ship, no handiwork of man could equal her impressiveness as
she bore down before the wind, sail mounting on sail of billowing
whiteness, until for the small hull cleaving the waves so swiftly, to
carry all seemed nothing sort of marvelous. Always there was a hail and an
interchange of names and ports; sometimes both vessels rounded to and
boats passed and repassed. But now the courtesies of the sea have gone
with its picturesqueness. Great ocean liners rushing through the deep,
give each other as little heed as railway trains passing on parallel
tracks. A twinkle of electric signals, or a fluttering of parti-colored
flags, and each seeks its own horizon--the incident bounded by minutes
where once it would have taken hours.

It would not be easy to say whether the sailor's lot has been lightened or
not, by the substitution of steel for wood, of steam for sail. Perhaps the
best evidence that the native-born American does not regard the change as
wholly a blessing, is to be found in the fact that but few of them now
follow the sea, and scarcely a vestige is left of the old New England
seafaring population except in the fisheries--where sails are still the
rule. Doubtless the explanation of this lies in the changed conditions of
seafaring as a business. In the days which I have sketched in the first
chapter, the boy of good habits and reasonable education who shipped
before the mast, was fairly sure of prompt promotion to the quarter-deck,
of a right to share in the profits of the voyage, and of finally owning
his own ship. After 1860 all these conditions changed. Steamships, always
costly to build, involved greater and greater investments as their size
increased. Early in the history of steam navigation they became
exclusively the property of corporations. Latterly the steamship lines
have become adjuncts to great railway lines, and are conducted by the
practiced stock manipulator--not by the veteran sea captain.

Richard J. Cleveland, a successful merchant navigator of the early days of
the nineteenth century, when little more than a lad, undertook an
enterprise, thus described by him in a letter from Havre:

"I have purchased a cutter-sloop of forty-three tons burden, on
a credit of two years. This vessel was built at Dieppe and
fitted out for a privateer; was taken by the English, and has
been plying between Dover and Calais as a packet-boat. She has
excellent accommod