to Hong Kong when he was sailing by some old charts, “seventeen hundred and something”—the “English Pilot” for a guess—wherein certain islands were sketched in as “uncertain.” They were running into this region on a beautiful moonlight night, and the captain and a passenger he was carrying went aloft and smoked, and watched, until past midnight. But at two he was called up again, and there directly over the bow were palm-trees thick in the moonlight. They had grazed, and cleared, the island of Monte Verde, some twenty miles in length, which of course was charted on the more modern maps of the day. And it was in this same southern sea that he once ran in and out of a hurricane. He could have veered out of its path, but he was in his rash youth, and the fringe of it giving a good breeze, he reefed up and went flying ahead under bare poles, through a tremendous gale that soon had him at its will. Suddenly, like a flash, there was entire calm, and stillness save for the distant roaring of the hurricane: he realized that he had got into the very centre of it, which travels ahead only some twelve miles an hour, but whirls round and round with incredible velocity. He knew that he had somehow to drive his ship out of the vortex that was sure to suck him down, and again through the outer turmoil—booming like thunder, flattening the boat on her beam ends—he, making sure the end had come, but driving her on, again won through, and the boat righting herself, continued on her way. The captain never again wooed the favoring breeze of a hurricane. The very names of their ships stir the imagination: the Light Foot, the Chariot of Fame, the Chispa, the Rosario, named for the wife of an owner who had been a captain in his day and had loved and won a Spanish beauty. The Whirlwind and Challenger were famous clipper ships; and one man commanded successively the Undaunted, the Kingfisher, the Monsoon and Mogul and Ocean King, and the steamers Zenobia and Palmyra—and Edward Everett. There was the Young Turk and Santa Claus, the Tally Ho, the Expounder and Centaur and Cape Cod; the Agenor and Charmer and Valhalla, the Shooting Star and the Flying Dragon, the Altof Oak, and, quaintly, the Rice Plant; the Oxenbridge and Kedar. Some ships were so famous that when their day was done, they passed down their names to ships of a younger generation than theirs. Masters changed from one ship to another, and discussion as to how this captain and that handled the Expounder or Monsoon on such or such a voyage filled many a long evening of their old age at home. II