It is a merest truism; we hear it in the storm; the very waves are its witnesses. Everywhere and under each condition, it is true. The proof lies all about. We read it on every page of history; behold it when armies overthrow a throne or the oak falls beneath the axe of the woodman. Do I disfavor war? On the contrary, I approve it as an institution of greatest excellence. War slays; war has its blood. But has peace no victims? Peace kills thousands where war kills tens; and if one is to consider misery, why then there be more starvation, more cold, more pain, and more suffering in one year of New York City peace than pinched and gnawed throughout the whole four years of civil war. And human life is of comparative small moment. We say otherwise; we believe otherwise; but we don’t act otherwise. Action is life’s text. Humanity is itself the preacher; in that silent sermon of existence--an existence of world’s goods and their acquirement--we forever show the thing of least consequence to be the life of man. However, I am not myself to preach, I who pushed forth to tell a story. It is the defect of age to be garrulous, and as one’s power to do departs, its place is ever taken by a weakness to talk. This filibusterer whom I liberated to sail against Spain, I long ago told you was called Ryan. That, however, is a fictitious name; there was a Ryan, and the Spaniards took his life at Santiago. And because he with whom I dealt was also put up against a wall and riddled with Spanish lead, and further, because it is not well to give his true name, I call him Ryan now. His ship rode on her rope in New York bay; I was given the Harriet Lane to hold him from sailing away; his owners ashore--merchants these and folk on ’change--offered me ten thousand dollars; the gold was in bags, forty pounds of it; I turned my back at evening and in the morning he was gone. You have been told how I never thought on those adventures of The Emperor’s Cigars, and The German Girl’s Diamonds, without sensations of shame, and pain. Indeed! they were engagements of ignobility! Following the latter affair I felt a strongest impulse to change somewhat my occupation. I longed for an employment a bit safer and less foul. I counted my fortunes; I was rich with over seventy thousand dollars; that might do, even though I gained no more. And so it fell that I was almost ready to leave the Customs, and forswear and, if possible, forget, those sins I had helped commit in its name.