Daniel Merrithew was one of the Merrithews of a town near Boston, a
prime old seafaring family. His father had a waning interest in three
whaling-vessels; and when two of them opened like crocuses at their
piers in New Bedford, being full of years, and the third foundered in
the Antarctic, the old man died, chiefly because he could see no clear
way of longer making a living.

Young Merrithew at the time was in a New England preparatory school,
playing excellent football and passing examinations by the skin of his
teeth. Thrown upon his own resources, his mother having died in early
years, he had to decide whether he would work his way through the
school and later through college, or trust to such education as he
already had to carry him along in the world.

It was altogether adequate for practical purposes, he argued, and so he
lost little time in proceeding to New York, where he began a business
career as a clerk in the office of the marine superintendent of a great
coal-carrying railroad. It was a beginning with a quick ending. The
clerkly pen was not for him; he discovered this before he was told.
The blood of the Merrithews was not to be denied; and turning to the
salt water, his request for a berth on one of the company's big
sea-going tugs was received with every manifestation of approval.

When he first presented himself to the Captain of the _Hydrographer_,
the bluff skipper set the young man down as a college boy in search of
sociological experience and therefore to be viewed with good-humored
tolerance--good-humored, because Dan was six feet tall and had
combative red-gold hair. His steel eyes were shaded by long
straw-colored lashes; he had a fighting look about him. He had a
magnificent temper, red, but not uncalculating, with a punch like a