The greater size of vessels and their swifter trips under steam, have had the effect of depopulating the ocean, even in established trade routes. In the old days of ocean travel the meeting of a ship at sea was an event long to be remembered. The faint speck on the horizon, discernible only through the captain's glass, was hours in taking on the form 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: