Street, he followed with his family and placed
himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of
Richard Henry Dana, the author of 'Two Years Before the Mast.' Like
nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much
my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially
as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which
was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men. I never saw
anything of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend of
those patrician qualities and democratic principles which made Lowell
anomalous even to himself. He is part of the anti-slavery history of his
time, and he gave to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a
politician; his gifts and learning in the law were freely at their
service. He never lost his interest in those white slaves, whose brutal
bondage he remembered as bound with them in his 'Two Years Before the
Mast,' and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might count upon his
friendship as surely as the black slaves of the South. He was able to
temper his indignation for their oppression with a humorous perception of
what was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish I could recall
all that he said once about sea-etiquette on merchant vessels, where the
chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being
addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign. He
was amusing in his stories of the Pacific trade in which he said it was
very noble to deal in furs from the Northwest, and very ignoble to deal
in hides along the Mexican and South American coasts. Every ship's
master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of
Dana's instances, two vessels encounter in mid-ocean, and exchange the
usual parley as to their respective ports of departure and destination.
The final demand comes through the trumpet, "What cargo?" and the captain
so challenged yields to temptation and roars back "Furs!" A moment of
hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, "Here and there a
horn?"

There were other distinctions, of which seafaring men of other days were
keenly sensible, and Dana dramatized the meeting of a great, swelling
East Indiaman, with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her. She
shouts back through her captain's trumpet that she is from Calcutta, and
laden with silks, spices, and other orient treasu