Though not embarrassed by publishers, I found a more formidable enemy on my tracks in 1892. There had been a change in the Bureau of Navigation, and the new chief, under whom the College was, thought my help to it less necessary than my going to sea. To an advocate of allowing me time, he replied, summarily, "It is not the business of a naval officer to write books." As an aphorism the remark is doubtless unassailable; but, with a policy thus defined, my position, again to quote Boatswain Chucks, became "precarious and not at all permanent." That my turn for sea service had come was indisputable. I could pretend to no grievance, but I did want first to finish that book. Yet I have recalled with happiness that I was enabled to work steadfastly on, my pulse beating no quicker for fear I should be interrupted and my task left unfinished. I remember a Boston publisher telling me of the anxiety felt by one of his distinguished clients, lest death should overtake him before that which he had planned was completed. The feeling is common to man, and one is touched by the apparent tragedy when men of promise and achievement are so removed, their aims unaccomplished, as were recently Professor Rawson Gardiner and Sir William Hunter; but it was given me early to realize that there is no such thing as being cut off unbetimes. If I were called at the end of a day's stint, or the pen fell from my hand in the midst of it, that which was appointed me was done; if well done, what mattered the rest? This quietness came to me through a chain of thought. I had been experiencing, as many others have, the weariness of a long-winded job, the end of which seemed to recede with each day's progress; and there came to my mind Long-fellow's "Village Blacksmith:" "Toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing, Onward through life he goes; Each morning sees some task begin, _Each evening sees it close_." Would it were so with me! And a voice replied, "Is it not so with you? with all?" Since then I have understood; though the flesh is often weak, and even the calm of the study cannot always exclude the contagious fever of our American pace. In the particular juncture, the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Tracy, took my view of relative importances, and time was secured me. The manuscript was complete by the late spring of 1892, and the book published in December, having meantime been used for lectures in the first session of the College in its new building; a renewal of life which has since proved continuous.