r kind, but
just as efficient and just as heroic in another way--the way of his
day--is rapidly creating another tradition. The lad who in the lusty
days of his youth can thus hold himself in check is a pretty good
product of American development. He pretty generally passes up the
grog-shop, but he visits the art galleries, the museums, the cathedrals,
the K. of C.'s, and Y. M. C. A.'s ashore, takes books from the library
on shipboard, buys post-cards and mails them home to let his friends
know of the great things in the world. On that world cruise referred to
the men cleaned Rio de Janeiro out of 250,000 post-cards.

I doubt if many of them, on the first try, could lay out on a
topsail-yard in a gale of wind without immediately falling overboard;
but they don't have to lay out on topsail-yards nowadays. They do have
to shoot, however; and they can shoot. Lay a gun's crew of them behind a
big turret-gun and watch them make lacework of a target at 11,000 yards.

* * * * *

The main question is, Have we the spirit to-day? As to that, no man
having yet devised any apparatus wherewith to measure energy of soul and
mind, it is difficult to prove to whoever will not believe, or does not
in himself possess the germ, the existence of this thing that may not be
measured by foot-rule or bushel basket. The belching of powder and the
roll of drumhead do not prove it. We can always hire men to do that, and
to do it well. And yet, to be present at the review described in the
preceding chapter was to experience the thrill that may not be measured,
to note how the enthusiasm of the occasion seemed to be animating the
crews, to share in the feeling of pride which mantled all cheeks, and,
ship after ship slipping past, to feel that pride of fleet intensify,
until we echoed the cry of the Commander-in-Chief, whose enthusiasm for
all that is good for the nation is unquenchable. As the President said,
it was a glorious day.

No doubt of it. Men had met and there was kinship in the meeting. From
that auspicious opening in the morning when the clouds seemed to
dissolve for the express purpose of allowing a fresh-washed sky to enter
into the color scheme of the beautiful picture--blue dome, chalk-white
and sea-green war-ships, green and blue and white-edged little
seas--until that last moment at night when the last call on the last
ship was blown and to its lingering cadence the last unwinking
incandescent of