Among the papers was found the right to an estate of considerable value, and when, after great difficulty, the descendants and owners were traced, it was discovered that the family had suffered more or less privation from the loss of these papers, restored after so many years.
[WHAT IT MEANS TO RUN AN OCEAN GREYHOUND.]
BY THE CAPTAIN OF THE "NEW YORK."
SUNDAY MORNING MUSTER OF THE CREW.
Above all, it means unceasing vigilance. It is said that a man who rides often over the same road can fall asleep in the saddle and still travel it safely. Such a man would be drummed out of the steamship service. Every man who has to do with the sailing of an ocean greyhound must be on the alert every moment of his tour of duty. No matter how many scores of times he may have sailed over the route between New York and Southampton, he must be constantly on the lookout for all that he can read in sea and sky, or in the earth beneath the sea. For two things he is responsible—the safety and speed with which the journey is made. Nothing else appeals to him. The greatest orator of the finest singer in the world might appear and perform on deck, and I doubt whether the men on the bridge would see him or hear him. The ship is like a great cannon-ball that has been shot out of one port to strike the other. The officers of the ship are to make that cannon-ball go true to the mark without deviating in the least degree from the course. That duty is so absorbing that nothing else can be allowed to interfere with it.
Gales cannot stop nor fogs hinder the swift passage of the transatlantic liner. She flies onward with what seems to be an entire disregard of storms. But these things are not disregarded. They are grappled with and fought against, and man triumphs over the fury of the elements. Nothing is left to chance. Every emergency that experience or imagination can suggest is prepared for and studied out long in advance. Friends sometimes ask the captain of a great ship if the nervous strain does not exhaust him; if he is not depressed by the responsibility for so many hundreds of lives and so many millions of dollars worth of property. The answer to that question is always no. If the captain were to give himself up to such reflections he would be unfit for his position. The captain's experience is long and varied before he becomes master of an ocean greyhound. His responsibility is small at first, but constantly grows greater, until he is no more worried by it than you would be worried by having to drive a pair of ponies.
THE PROMENADE DECK OF THE "NEW YORK."