His emotion is not to be explained; nor another high moment of his life which had to do with a flashing merchantman seen from the water-front at San Francisco--square-rigged throughout, a cloud of sail-cloth, her royals yet to be lifted, as she got underweigh. He knew that considerable canvas was still spread between California, Australia and the Islands, but what a well-kept if ancient maiden of the _Jade’s_ species was doing here in New York harbour, A. D. Nineteen hundred and odd, was not disclosed to Bellair until afterward, and not clearly then. He knew her for a barkentine, and in the intensely personal appeal of the moment he was a bit sorry for the blend. To his eyes the schooner-rig of mizzen and main masts was not to be compared for beauty to the trisected fore. Still he reflected that square-rigged throughout, she would be crowded with crew to care for her, and that her concession to trade was at least not outright. Schooner, bark and brig--he seemed to know them first hand, not only from pictures and pages of print, though there had been many long evenings of half-dream with books before him--books that always pushed back impatiently through the years of upstart Steam into Nature’s own navigation, where Romance has put on her brave true form in the long perspective. Ships that really _sailed_ were one of Bellair’s passions, like orchards and vined stone-work--all far from him apparently and out of the question--loved the more because of it.... He watched with rapt eyes now, estimated the _Jade’s_ length at one-seventy-five and was debating her tonnage when a huge ox of a man appeared from the cabin (while the _Jade_ slid farther out), waddled aft as if bare-footed, spoke to an officer there, and then held up two brown hairy, thick-fingered hands, palms extended to the pier--as if to push Brooklyn from him forever.... The officer’s voice just reached shore, but not his words. A Japanese woman appeared on the receding deck. “_Jade of Adelaide_,” muttered Bellair, moments afterward. A tug was towing her straight toward Staten. He thought of her lying off the glistening white beach of a coral island two months hence, surrounded by native craft, all hands helping the big man get ashore.... At this moment a young man emerged from the harbour-front door of the Hatmos office, locking it after him. Bellair came up from his dream. Such realities of the city man are mainly secret. It was the worn surface that Bellair presented to the stranger, a sophisticated and imperturbable surface, and one employed so often that its novelty was gone. “Where’s she going?” he asked. “Who?” Bellair smiled at the facetiousness. “The _Jade_,” he said gently. “Just as far from here as she can get.” “Round the world?” “I doubt if she’ll come back.” “You don’t see many of them any more----” “No,” replied the other agreeably enough, “this old dame and two or three sisters are about all that call here. Hatmos & Co. get ’em all.”