THE INTERNATIONAL MARINE AND ZOO FLOTATION COMPANY
I have never yet been quite able to make up my mind with any degree of definiteness in regard to the sanity of my son Noah. In many respects he is a fine fellow. His moral character is beyond reproach, and I have never caught him in any kind of a wilful deception such as many parents bewail in their offspring, and I know that he has no bad habits. He has no liking for cigarette smoking, and he keeps good company and good hours. His sons Shem, Ham and Japhet, are great favorites with all of us, and as far as mere respectability goes there is no family in the land that stands higher than his, but the complete obsession of his mind by this International Marine and Zoo Flotation Company of his is entirely beyond my comprehension, and his attempts to explain it to me are futile, because its utter impracticability, and the reasons advanced for its use seem so absurd that I lose my temper before he gets half way through the first page of his prospectus. From his boyhood up he has been fond of the water, and when the bath-tub was first invented we did not have to drive him to it, as most parents have to do with most boys, but on the contrary we had all we could do to keep him away from it. I don't think any one in my household for five hundred years was able to take a bath on any night of the week without first having to clear away from the tub the evidence of Noah's interest in marine matters. Nothing in the world seemed to delight his spirit more as a child than to fill the tub full of water, turn on the shower at its fullest speed, and play what he called flood in it, with a shingle or a chip, or if he could not find either of these, with a floating leaf. Many a time I have found him long after he was supposed to have gone to bed sitting on the bath-room floor singing a roysterous nautical song like "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep," or "A Life On the Ocean Wave," while he pushed a floating soap dish filled with ants, spiders and lady-bugs up and down that overflowing tub; and later in his life, when more manly sports would seem to be more to any one's tastes, while his playmates were out in the open chasing the Discosaurus over the hills, or trapping Pterodactyls in the bull-rushes, he would go off by himself into the woods where he had erected what he called his ship-yard, and whittle out gondolas, canoes, battle-ships, arks and other marine craft day in and day out until one could hardly walk in the dark without stubbing his toe on some kind of a boat. I recall once coming upon him on the farther slopes of Mount Ararat, putting the finishing touches to as graceful a cat-boat as any one ever saw—a thing that would have excited the envy of mariners in all parts of the world, but in spite of my admiration for his handicraft, it worried me more than I can say when I thought of all the labor he had expended on such a work miles away from any kind of a water course. It did not seem to square with my ideas as to what constituted sense.
"It is very beautiful, my son," I observed, after inspecting the vessel carefully for a few moments. "Her lines are perfect, and the model indicates that she will prove a speedy proposition, but it seems to me that you have left out one of the most important features of a permanently successful sailing vessel."
Noah looked at me patronizingly, and shrugged his shoulders as much as to inquire what on earth I knew about boat-building.
"If you refer either to the bowsprit or to the flying balloon-jib," he replied coldly, and acting generally as if he were very much bored, "you are entirely wrong. This isn't a sloop, or a catamaran, or a caravel. Neither is it a government transport, an ocean gray-hound, or a ram. It's just a cat-boat, nothing more."
"No," said I. "I refer to nothing of the sort. I don't know much about boats, but I know enough to be aware without your telling me, that this affair is not a battle-ship, tug, collier, brig, lugger, barge or gravy-boat. Neither is it a dhow, gig or skiff. But that does not affect the validity of my criticism that you have forgotten an important factor in her successful use as a sailing craft."
"What is it?" he demanded, curtly.
"An ocean," said I. "How the dickens do you expect to sail a boat like that off here in the woods, where there isn't enough water to float a parlor-match?"
He laughed quietly as I advanced this objection, and for the first time in his life gave evidence of the haunting idea that later took complete possession of his mind.
"Time enough for that," said he. "There'll be more ocean around here some day than you can keep off with a million umbrellas, and don't you forget it."