In 1807, the first practical steamboat puffed slowly up the Hudson,
while the people ranged along the banks gazed in wonder. Even the grim
walls of the Palisades must have been surprised at the strange intruder.
Robert Fulton's _Clermont_ was the forerunner of the fleets upon fleets
of power-driven craft that have stemmed the currents of a thousand
streams and parted the waves of many seas.

The _Clermont_ took several days to go from New York to Albany, and the
trip was the wonder of that time.

During the summer of 1902 a long, slim, white craft, with a single brass
smokestack and a low deck-house, went gliding up the Hudson with a kind
of crouching motion that suggested a cat ready to spring. On her deck
several men were standing behind the pilot-house with stop-watches in
their hands. The little craft seemed alive under their feet and quivered
with eagerness to be off. The passenger boats going in the same
direction were passed in a twinkling, and the tugs and sailing vessels
seemed to dwindle as houses and trees seem to shrink when viewed from
the rear platform of a fast train.

Two posts, painted white and in line with each other--one almost at the
river's edge, the other 150 feet back--marked the starting-line of a
measured mile, and were eagerly watched by the men aboard the yacht. She
sped toward the starting-line as a sprinter dashes for the tape; almost
instantly the two posts were in line, the men with watches cried "Time!"
and the race was on. Then began such a struggle with Father Time as was
never before seen; the wind roared in the ears of the passengers and
snatched their words away almost before their lips had formed them; the
water, a foam-flecked streak, dashed away from the gleaming white sides
as if in terror. As the wonderful craft sped on she seemed to settle