rn, on the fourteenth day of
February, in 1847. Three boys and two girls had preceded me in the
family circle, and when I was two years old my younger sister came. We
were little better off in Newcastle than in London, and now my father
began to dream the great dream of those days. He would go to America.
Surely, he felt, in that land of infinite promise all would be well with
him and his. He waited for the final payment of his debts and for my
younger sister's birth. Then he bade us good-by and sailed away to make
an American home for us; and in the spring of 1851 my mother followed
him with her six children, starting from Liverpool in a sailing-vessel,
the John Jacob Westervelt.

I was then little more than four years old, and the first vivid memory
I have is that of being on shipboard and having a mighty wave roll
over me. I was lying on what seemed to be an enormous red box under a
hatchway, and the water poured from above, almost drowning me. This was
the beginning of a storm which raged for days, and I still have of it a
confused memory, a sort of nightmare, in which strange horrors figure,
and which to this day haunts me at intervals when I am on the sea. The
thing that stands out most strongly during that period is the white face
of my mother, ill in her berth. We were with five hundred emigrants on
the lowest deck of the ship but one, and as the storm grew wilder an
unreasoning terror filled our fellow-passengers. Too ill to protect her
helpless brood, my mother saw us carried away from her for hours at a
time, on the crests of waves of panic that sometimes approached her
and sometimes receded, as they swept through the black hole in which
we found ourselves when the hatches were nailed down. No madhouse, I am
sure, could throw more hideous pictures on the screen of life than
those which met our childish eyes during the appalling three days of the
storm. Our one comfort was the knowledge that our mother was not afraid.
She was desperately ill, but when we were able to reach her, to cling
close to her for a blessed interval, she was still the sure refuge she
had always been.

On the second day the masts went down, and on the third day the disabled
ship, which now had sprung a leak and was rolling helplessly in the
trough of the sea, was rescued by another ship and towed back to
Queenstown, the nearest port. The passengers, relieved of their
anxieties, went from their extreme of fear to an equal extreme of
drun