Had the society that frequented his mother’s drawing-room in the lovely old French city not been so brilliant, the ladies so entertaining, the gentlemen so distinguished, Steven Mercer would have rebelled quite openly against a life that seemed to him mainly frills and lace. He was happier on the river than anywhere. For one reason only would Steven stay at home, his keeled boat moored idly at a delta wharf: to hear epauletted gentlemen recount the thrills of the War of 1812; to listen spellbound while naval celebrities who had been with Decatur told of that immemorial engagement in the Tripolitan harbor. That had been in the year of Steven’s birth. It was a bitter disappointment to a boy of seventeen to reflect that those days were over. “Steven prefers combat,” his mother lamented; “now that there are no more wars, he wants to run away to sea, to trade, I am sure!” She was always afraid of this vulgar reversion. “Why not?” Hamilton Mercer would reply to his wife. “Steven is a man grown. This country is new. It breeds men.” He looked with pride on his son’s six feet, on the breadth of him. When Steven was twenty-one he would take him into the business of Mercer & Co., the largest mercantile importing house in Louisiana. Let him do as he wished until then, aside from his studies. But his gay little French _maman_ made many demands upon Steven. She was exacting as to his manners, but for the rest did not trouble about whether he roamed the plantation or studied his Greek. As a child she had been content to turn him over to his governess or his tutors. Now that he had grown into a tall, muscular youth, and a handsome one, he must attend her levees, escort her at times. And although Steven admired his mother very much and had been brought up to the life, it must be confessed that he preferred his father’s wharves to his mother’s drawing-room. Quick enough at goods and figures, still he went less often to the offices of Mercer & Co. than to the riverside. Yet trade was already claiming him for her own, to tread in the footsteps of his paternal ancestors--ship captains, merchants, and merchant owners of good vessels all--whose blood stirred restlessly in his veins, calling him to new markets and to adventure. Down on the wharves, where vessels from strange ports were putting in with their merchandise for the warehouses of Mercer & Co., that was where Steven had always loved to be. Where the negroes talked in their own river talk, and fought the English-speaking blacks of the West Indies. Where one could talk in villainous Portuguese with equally villainous-looking, ear-ringed sailors, with salty first mates from Lisbon, Calcutta, Hong-Kong, Liverpool. Across the Gulf to Mexican ports went their cargoes, and up the river to that wide inner country searched by the sinuous fingers of the great Mississippi, the Father of Waters.