The event justified his sagacity. None of his brothers made fortunes; Thaddeus was killed by a black-fish in the Northern Pacific, and Seth died of the scurvy in Hudson’s Bay. When Silas began to be really successful in New York, he kept up little intercourse with his brothers. Mrs. Gower does not remember them at all; so, at all events, she tries to think, though she had one great scare. In ’64, just as she was beginning to think of her coming out in society, her uncle Obed, then a hale, grizzled old fellow of sixty winters (most of which were Arctic ones), made himself very prominent by resisting a Confederate cruiser with harpoons and a couple of bomb-lance guns. This was a terrible event for pretty Miss Flossie, as it got into all the papers, making quite a hero of poor old uncle Obed; and several of her father’s friends had no more _savoir faire_ than to speak of the old whaleman as her father’s brother at a dinner-party. However, uncle Obed never troubled them in New York; and shortly after her marriage (to which he had been invited by cards accidentally mailed only two days before the wedding) he died, to her inexpressible relief; whether childless or not, she never troubled herself to inquire. Now, however, Mrs. Gower speaks with much pride of her brave old seafaring ancestors. Thus it came about that all the virtue of the race, as well as all their wealth, is now vested in Mrs. Gower and her brother, Howland Starbuck. The wealth has but gilded the wings on which she soared; her virtues were her own. CHAPTER II. FLOSSIE STARBUCK ASPIRES. There was a time when Mrs. Gower was not fashionable. It is necessary, for our purpose, to go back to these dark ages. Her maidenhood was passed in unobtrusive splendor behind a frowning brown-stone front on a cross-street only two doors from Fifth Avenue. This house was one of a thousand: nine hundred and ninety-nine other New York houses were just like it. Here old Silas Starbuck for his twenty last years, led an even life, torpid in his undigested gold. Here Miss Florence pressed her girlish nose against the window-pane to stare at the opposite houses and wonder who the inmates were, and whether their lives were like to hers; or she strained her large eyes sideways to reach the perspective of morning ash-barrels, reaching in either direction to the avenue beyond. She did not then even know that brown-stone fronts were expensive, when she looked and speculated so wearily upon them.