down before the fire; then he returned to his place before the mantel. "I first met Benjamin Corvet," he commenced, "nearly thirty years ago. I had come West for the first time the year before; I was about your own age and had been graduated from college only a short time, and a business opening had offered itself here. "There was a sentimental reason—I think I must call it that—as well, for my coming to Chicago. Until my generation, the property of our family had always been largely—and generally exclusively—in ships. It is a Salem family; a Sherrill was a sea-captain, living in Salem, they say, when his neighbors—and he, I suppose—hanged witches; we had privateers in 1812 and our clippers went round the Horn in '49. The Alabama ended our ships in '63, as it ended practically the rest of the American shipping on the Atlantic; and in '73, when our part of the Alabama claims was paid us, my mother put it in bonds waiting for me to grow up. "Sentiment, when I came of age, made me want to put this money back into ships flying the American flag; but there was small chance of putting it—and keeping it, with profit—in American ships on the sea. In Boston and New York, I had seen the foreign flags on the deep-water ships—British, German, French, Norwegian, Swedish, and Greek; our flag flew mostly on ferries and excursion steamers. But times were booming on the great lakes. Chicago, which had more than recovered from the fire, was doubling its population every decade; Cleveland, Duluth, and Milwaukee were leaping up as ports. Men were growing millions of bushels of grain which they couldn't ship except by lake; hundreds of thousands of tons of ore had to go by water; and there were tens of millions of feet of pine and hardwood from the Michigan forests. Sailing vessels such as the Sherrills had always operated, it is true, had seen their day and were disappearing from the lakes; were being 'sold,' many of them, as the saying is, 'to the insurance companies' by deliberate wrecking. Steamers were taking their place. Towing had come in. The first of the whalebacks was built about that time, and we began to see those processions of a barge and two, three, or four tows which the lakemen called 'the sow and her pigs.' Men of all sorts had come forward, of course, and, serving the situation more or less accidentally, were making themselves rich. "It was railroading which had brought me West; but I had brought with me the Alabama money to put into ships. I have called it sentiment, but it was not merely that; I felt, young man though I was, that this
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