and raw, and brutal to them. They had sailed ships, and built ships, and owned and lost them; they had fought against nature and against man to keep their ships, and to make them profitable, and to get more of them. In the end a few, a very few comparatively, had survived; by daring, by enterprise, by taking great chances, they had thrust their heads above those of their fellows; they had come to own a half dozen, a dozen, perhaps a score of bottoms, and to have incomes of fifty, of a hundred, of two hundred thousand dollars a year.
Alan shut the book and sat thoughtful. He felt strongly the immensity, the power, the grandeur of all this; but he felt also its violence and its fierceness. What might there not have been in the life of his father who had fought up and made a way for himself through such things?
The tall clock in the hall struck nine. He got up and went out into the hall and asked for his hat and coat. When they had been brought him, he put them on and went out.
The snow had stopped some time before; a strong and increasing wind had sprung up, which Alan, with knowledge of the wind across his prairies, recognized as an aftermath of the greater storm that had produced it; for now the wind was from the opposite direction—from the west. He could see from the Sherrills' door step, when he looked toward the lighthouse at the harbor mouth winking red, white, red, white, at him, that this offshore wind was causing some new commotion and upheaval among the ice-floes; they groaned and labored and fought against the opposing pressure of the waves, under its urging.
