It may be said that whalemen are at home on the ocean. During the first fifteen or twenty years of their service, they scarcely remain at home with their families and friends as many months. It is no mean and unworthy profession, but one highly honorable and creditable for any aspirant. Nor is the responsible position of a captain, or officer, attained at once. Promotion comes not from the cabin windows, but in a direct line from the forecastle. There must be a regular apprenticeship gone through with, before one can expect to succeed in the hazardous undertaking of capturing the monsters of the deep. It is a _trade_, and in this regard it is far different from the merchant service. In addition to good seamanship,--and, by the way, whalemen are acknowledged to be among the best navigators in the world,--it is _whale killing_, an aptitude for this particular kind of work, that gives promise of attainment and success in the profession. This business, then, we say, holds out many reasonable inducements to a young man desirous of engaging in it. With a good common school education, energetic, faithful to himself and his employers, temperate, and withal having a purpose to be something and do something in the world, there are but few paths to honorable respect, character, influence, and pecuniary competence, more inviting than this. There are trials, and peculiar ones too, in the whaling service; and in what branch of industry are there not? But making all the allowances for long absences from home, which, without doubt, are the greatest deprivations of all, yet there are other considerations, which, it is believed, counterbalance these disadvantages. There are dangers also connected with whaling; aside from the storms and sufferings which whalemen experience in navigating those remote northern seas and oceans, the greatest exposure to life is doubtless in the work of whaling. Yet, taking into the account the number of vessels and seamen engaged in this business, the distant places visited by them, and the character of their employment, and we venture the assertion, that there is no department of commercial enterprise, whether coastwise or foreign, that can present a list more free from disaster, loss of life, or bad health among seamen, than the whaling fleet. While varied success attends the labors and deprivations of whalemen, yet, on the whole, we must conclude that the enterprise is as profitable, and furnishes as strong inducements for the investment of capital, as almost any other.