Thus to-day! yet a decade and less ago the city was far from being as energetic. Seattle then slept in the lethargy of a “boom” that had spent itself, and was but just beginning to feel the stir of new life and a solid and real prosperity. Splendid business blocks were but half tenanted, many of the original boomers were financially ruined, yet the city kept up its courage, and had an unabating faith that position and pluck would win out. Already this faith was beginning to have its reward in works, and the faint glimmerings of future great advancement were in sight. More business began to reach the port, and the often almost deserted docks had now and then a ship. One of these on the day of which I write was the Bowhead, and certainly business bustle was not wanting on and near her. Perhaps the amount of work going on was not so very great, but the bustle more than made up for that, and Ben Stovers, the Bowhead’s boatswain, was the guide and director of this bustle, and to blame for the most of its noise. Stovers had a voice as big as his frame, and that was six feet two in longitude, as he would have said, and it seemed almost that in latitude. Surely, like this terrestrial globe, his greatest circumference was at the equator. Captain Nickerson was wont to say that Stovers was worth his weight in ballast, and that made him the most valuable man on the ship. It was a stock joke on the part of the first mate, when the wind blew half a gale, the crew were aloft reefing topsails, and the good ship plunged to windward with her lee-rail awash, and her deck set on a perilous slant, to politely ask the mighty boatswain to step to the windward rail so that the ship might be on an even keel once more. It was the voice of this mighty man that was Harry’s first greeting as he came down the dock toward the vessel that was to be his home for the long cruise. It rolled up the dock and reëchoed from the warehouses, and every time its foghorn tones sounded, a little thrill of energy ran through the busy crew. “Hi there! Bear a hand with that cask,” it yelled, and two or three dusky Kanakas would jump as if stung, and the cask they had been languidly handling would roll up the gang-way as if it concealed a motor. “Come on now, Johnson, and you, Phipps; this is no South Sea siesta. Stir your mud-hooks and flip that bread aboard. Wow, whoop! you’re not on the beach now, you beach-combers; you’ve got wages coming to you. Step lively there!” Result, great rise and fall in breadstuffs, and boxes of hard bread going over the rail and down the hold in a way that made the Chinese cook below shout strange Oriental gibberish, in alarm lest the boxes be stove and the contents go adrift. “Lighter ahoy!”—this to the man driving a cart down the dock; “clap on sail now and come alongside. We’ve got to get away from this dock before night or the city’ll own the vessel for dock charges.”