Tidings of her proposed trip had already preceded her, and when after much anxious watching she was sighted there was the greatest enthusiasm along the water front, the over-zealous populace who wished to give her a royal welcome setting off a six-pounder in her honor that shattered to atoms most of her stained glass as she tied up at the dock." His audience laughed. "You see," continued the capitalist, "the ship came in answer to a circular sent out by our government to various shipbuilders asking bids from swift and reliable boats to carry our mails to England. Cunard immediately saw the commercial advantages of such an opportunity, and not having money enough to back the venture himself the Halifax man went to Scotland where he met Robert Napier, a person who like himself had had wide experience in shipping affairs. Both men were enthusiastic over the project; before long the money necessary for the undertaking was raised, and the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, with a line of four ships, was awarded the United States Government contract. These ships were very significantly named: the _Britannia_ in honor of England, the _Arcadia_ as a compliment to Mr. Cunard's Nova Scotia home, the _Caledonia_ in memory of Napier's Scotch ancestry, and the _Columbia_ out of regard to America. And in passing it is rather interesting to recall that in homage to these pioneer ships it has become a tradition of the Cunard Line to use names that terminate in the letter _a_ for all the ships that have followed them. For, you must remember, it was this modest group of steam packets that were the ancestors of such magnificent boats as the _Mauretania_ and _Lusitania_." "There was some difference!" interrupted Stephen. "Well, rather! Had you, however, told Samuel Cunard then that such mammoth floating hotels were possible he would probably not have believed you. He had task enough on his hands to carry the mails; transport the few venturesome souls that dared to cross the sea; and compete with the many rival steamship lines that sprang up on both sides of the ocean as soon as some one had demonstrated that trans-Atlantic travel was practical. For after Cunard had blazed the path there were plenty of less daring persons ready to steal from him the fruits of his vision and courage. From 1847 to 1857 the Ocean Steamship Company carried mails between New York and Bremen, and there was a very popular line that ran from New York to Havre, up to the period of the Civil War. Among the individual ships none, perhaps, was more celebrated than the _Great Eastern_, a vessel of tremendous length, and one that more nearly approached our present-day liners as to size. Then there was the Collins Line that openly competed with the Cunard Line; and to further increase trans-Atlantic travel, in 1855 Cornelius Vanderbilt, ever at the fore in novel projects, began operating lines of steamships not only to England and France but to Bremen."