"I hope I have," was the modest retort. "Furthermore," went on Mr. Ackerman, "there are other things beside scholarship to be considered in this bargain. We want fine, manly boys as well as wise ones. Conduct counts for a great deal, you know." Stephen felt himself coloring. "There have been no black marks on Dick's record thus far. How about yours, Steve?" asked the New York man. "I--er--no. I haven't had any black marks, either," responded Stephen, with a gulp of shame. "That is splendid, isn't it!" commented Mr. Ackerman. "I wasn't looking for them. You have too fine a father to be anything but a square boy." Once more Stephen knew himself to be blushing. If they would only talk about something else! "Are you going to finish your steamboat story for us while you are here?" inquired he with sudden inspiration. "Why, I had not thought of doing any steamboating down here," laughed the capitalist. "Rather I came to help the Pilgrims celebrate their first harvest." "But even they had to come to America by boat," suggested Doris mischievously. "I admit that," owned the New Yorker. "And what is more, they probably would have come in a steamboat if one had been running at the time." "What was the first American steamship to cross the Atlantic, Ackerman?" questioned Mr. Tolman when they were all seated before the library fire. "I suppose the _Savannah_ had that distinction," was the reply. "She was built in New York in 1818 to be used as a sailing packet; but she had side wheels and an auxiliary engine, and although she did not make the entire trans-Atlantic distance by steam she did cover a part of it under steam power. Her paddle wheels, it is interesting to note, were so constructed that they could be unshipped and taken aboard when they were not in use, or when the weather was rough. I believe it took her twenty-seven days to make the trip from Savannah to Liverpool and eighty hours of that time she was using her engine. Although she made several trips in safety it was quite a while before the American public was sufficiently convinced of the value of steam to build other steamships. A few small ones appeared in our harbors, it is true, but they came from Norway or England; they made much better records, too, than anything previously known, the _Sirius_ crossing in 1838 in nineteen days, and the _Great Western_ in fifteen. In the meantime shipbuilders on both sides of the Atlantic were studying the steamboat problem and busy brains in Nova Scotia and on the Clyde were working out an answer to the puzzle. One of the most alert of these brains belonged to Samuel Cunard, the founder of the steamship line that has since become world famous. In May, 1840, through his instrumentality, the _Unicorn_ set out from England for Boston arriving in the harbor June third after a voyage of sixteen days. When we reflect that she was a wooden side-wheeler, not much larger than one of our tugboats, we marvel that she ever put in her appearance.