In the ledgers his story was still alive. Yellow and dusty as they were, for me day by day they revivified that still odorous old warehouse until I saw it as it had been, a huge dim caravansary for the curious products of all the earth. And that trick of feeling a man, which I had learned in Paris, made me keenly sensitive now to this lonely old stranger by my side with whom I was becoming acquainted. I could feel the pull of these books upon him, pulling him out of his cramped old age back to his glad boundless youth. How suddenly spacious they became as he slowly turned the pages. Palm oil from Africa, cotton from Bombay, coffee from Arabia, pepper from Sumatra. Turn the page. Ivory from Zanzibar, salt from Cadiz and wines from Bordeaux. Turn the page. Whale oil from the Arctic, iron from the Baltic, tortoise shell from the Fiji Islands. Turn the page! India silks and rugs and shawls, indigo, spices! Turn the page! I began to see the sails speed out along those starlit ocean roads. I began to feel the forces that had shaped my father's life. And little by little I saw in those days what not even my mother had understood, that in my father's business life there had been more than dollars, that what to us had seemed only a hobby, a dull obstinate fixed idea, had been for him a glorious vision--the white sails of American clippers dotting all the seven seas. So they were in the late Fifties, when leaving the farm in Illinois he came at sixteen to New York and found a job as time clerk in one of the ship yards along the East River. They are all gone now, but then they were humming and teeming with work. And my young father was deeply excited. He told me of his first day here, when he stood on the deck of a ferry and watched three great clippers go out with the tide, bound for Calcutta. There were pictures of these vessels on the walls of his office, stately East Indiamen bearing such names as _Star of Empire_, _Daniel Webster_, _Ocean Monarch_, _Flying Cloud_--ships known in every port of the world for their speed. He told how a British vessel, her topsails reefed in a gale of wind, would see a white tower of swelling canvas come out of the spray behind her, come booming, staggering, plunging by--a Yankee clipper under royals. Press of sail? No other nation knew what it meant! Our owners took big chances, it was no trade for nervous men! He found a harbor that welcomed young men, where cabin boys rose to be captains, and clerks became owners of hundreds of ships. To work! To rise! To own yards like these, build ships like these and send them rushing on their courses out to all parts of the ocean world! This had been his vision, at the time when it was bright and clear. And as now he made me feel it, the crude vital force that had been in his dream poured into me deep, made me feel how shut in and one-sided had been my own vision and standards of life, gave me that profound surprise which many sons, I suppose, never have: