chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being
addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign. He
was amusing in his stories of the Pacific trade in which he said it was
very noble to deal in furs from the Northwest, and very ignoble to deal
in hides along the Mexican and South American coasts. Every ship's
master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of
Dana's instances, two vessels encounter in mid-ocean, and exchange the
usual parley as to their respective ports of departure and destination.
The final demand comes through the trumpet, "What cargo?" and the captain
so challenged yields to temptation and roars back "Furs!" A moment of
hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, "Here and there a
horn?"

There were other distinctions, of which seafaring men of other days were
keenly sensible, and Dana dramatized the meeting of a great, swelling
East Indiaman, with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her. She
shouts back through her captain's trumpet that she is from Calcutta, and
laden with silks, spices, and other orient treasures, and in her turn she
requires like answer from the sail which has presumed to enter into
parley with her. "What cargo?" The trader confesses to a mixed cargo for
Boston, and to the final question, her master replies in meek apology,
"Only from Liverpool, sir!" and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as
possible.

Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling was in Cambridge. He was
a lawyer in active practice, and he went every day to Boston. One was
apt to meet him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and forth
between the two cities, and which were often so full of one's
acquaintance that they had all the social elements of an afternoon tea.
They were abusively overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily