T is the fashion to mourn for Yankee ships as vanished from the blue water on which they won and held supremacy through the greater part of a century. Gone are the noble square-rigged fleets whose topsails lifted in roadsteads exotic and remote, while the few survivors of the intrepid race of mariners that manned them linger in old age as relics of another era. These obsolete figures are to be sought for in the ancient coastwise towns of New England, where the ships were built and the young men went in them until the call of the West led the spirit of adventurous enterprise inland. You may still hear brave yarns of thrashing close-reefed around the Horn or spreading clouds of canvas to the breath of the Indian Ocean. But of late these venerable narrators have been moved into the background, or totally eclipsed, by the fabulous prosperity of another kind of American sailing-vessel which they affected to despise.

This is the fore-and-after, the shapely coasting schooner which seldom ventured into the offshore trade and, laden with coal or lumber, was to be seen in many harbors from Portland to Pensacola. Originally a plodding little two-master handled by three or four men, her dimensions boldly increased until the shipyards of Maine and Boston were launching the five and six masted schooners whose capacity far exceeded that of the clippers of romance and which challenged them for speed and stanchness. With native ingenuity the donkey-engine was employed to hoist the mighty area of sail, and a dozen foremast hands were able to do the work of thirty. Almost with the regularity of steamer schedules, these huge coasters plied between Norfolk and the northern Atlantic ports, freighting 4,000 and 5,000 tons of coal at a voyage. They were commanded by splendidly efficient seamen of the old American stock, who upheld the traditions of smartness and discipline, and encountered in the leeshore, the shoal, and the sudden winter gale

dodging pirates and privateers or fighting them with carronade and pike. These were community enterprises. The neighbors shared the hazards with the builder and the skipper, investing their money, labor, and goods in part ownership of the ship and her cargo and aptly calling it their "adventures."

This honest custom has endured into the present century, and the man in the Maine seaport who wishes to build a schooner still looks to his friends and neighbors to buy the shares, or "pieces," that will enable him to finance the undertaking. There may be thirty owners when the long hull slips into the water from the keel-blocks of the yard, and among them are likely to be the carpenters, the blacksmiths, and the riggers who created her. And because of this old-fashioned cooperation, such vessels as these are built on honor, with skilled and careful artisanship and material scrupulously selected. Now, when dull times overtook the coastwise trade in recent years there was scrimping anxiety in many and many a home whose savings had been invested in schooners. The value of a craft of mod

erate size was divided into sixty-four "pieces," each of which had cost its owner about $1,000. And many of these were declaring "left-handed dividends,' which means that the shareholders were assessed to meet the operating expenses. Some sold out at a loss, but the habit of sending savings to sea was strongly in the blood, and most of them grimly hung on and hoped for better days.

The war in Europe, which wrought such dreadful havoc in so many other directions, awakened these drowsy ports and called these waiting fleets to hoist anchor. The merchant navies of the world were inadequate for the commerce urgently demanded of them, and the sailing-vessel had come into its own again. Presently the tall schooners were seeking the old trail of the square-rigger, out to Rio and Buenos Ayres, to the west coast of Africa, across to Lisbon and to London River, to quays and havens where the stars and stripes had not fluttered from a masthead in generations. A few months and almost all the great five and six masters had vanished from the coast. Then the smaller. schooners were snapped up for this golden

offshore trade, and those that remained at home found a wonderful harvest because of the scarcity of domestic tonnage. It was like a fairy-tale of commerce, and somehow more wholesomely gratifying than the fevered activity of munition stocks in Wall Street with their inflation and jobbery. These fine ships deserved to live, and those who owned them had been steadfast in fair weather and foul. For example, there was the six-master E. B. Winslow, which had been carrying coal from Norfolk to Portland; and she is one of scores whose good fortune has been as dazzling. She was chartered for Rio with 5,000 tons of coal beneath her hatches and came home laden with manganese ore after a voyage of seven months. Her owners received $180,000 in freight money, or considerably more than the cost of building her, and $120,000 of this was net profit to be distributed as dividends.

It soon became commonplace information to hear that a schooner had paid for herself in one voyage offshore. Those who preferred to sell instead of charter also enjoyed a sort of Arabian Nights come true. There was the retired skipper of Portland who recklessly bought an old vessel two years ago for $17,000, a tre

mendous speculation which absorbed all he had thriftily tucked away in a lifetime at sea, and strained his credit besides. In two voyages this sturdy coaster put $35,000 in his pocket, after which he sold her for $100,000 and dared to indulge in the long-deferred luxury of navigating his own cabin catboat.

It was also in Portland that I met a ship-owner who had from year to year bought "pieces" in schooners of all sizes until he had ventures in more than a hundred of them. He was willing to confess that he no longer carried them on his books as losing investments. A list of shares which had cost him $52,000 had yielded dividends of $35,000 in four months. Another list, costing a total of $6,000 when purchased, he was willing to sell outright for $125,000, but showed no great eagerness to separate himself from them.

And there was the widow who weeded the flowers in the dooryard of the gray cottage within sound of the surf near Thomaston. Her man had been lost in the schooner which he commanded, leaving her a thirty-fourth interest, which he had acquired from the managing owners. Some years there had been dividends, said she, but more than once she was