PART I

With the Outgoing Tide

I

“THEY THAT GO OUT IN SHIPS”

“DO really nice ladies smoke cigarettes, papa?” my young daughter asked of me perplexedly, awaiting an answer.

“No, I don’t think they do,” I replied hesitatingly, the passing of severe judgments not being much to my liking.

“Do really nice ladies drink whiskey?” the young interrogator continued. This time I answered with more assurance.

“No. Really nice ladies do not drink whiskey.”

“But, papa dear, so many ladies in our cabin either drink or smoke, and I think they are very nice.”

My little woman is perhaps a better judge of human nature than her Puritanized papa; for going into the smoking-room of the Italian steamer on which we had embarked, I saw, indeed, a number of women smoking and drinking and pretending to enjoy both, with that pharisaic air of abandon which convinced me that they were “really nice” ladies. They were “sailing away for a year and a day,” and were celebrating their liberation from the conventionalities of their environment by “being quite European,” as one of them expressed it.

Ladies who smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails in the smoking-room of an ocean steamer cannot expect that the gentlemen, whose domain they have invaded, will wait for an introduction before beginning a conversation, and soon I was deep in the discussion of the aforesaid cigarettes and cocktails, as pertaining to ladies who are “really nice.” One of these ladies was from “ye ancient and godly town” of Hartford, Conn., and her revered ancestors sleep in the Center Church cemetery, all unconscious of the fact that “The better set, to which I belong,” quoting the descendant of the revered ancestors, “smokes and drinks and breaks the Sabbath.” “And swears?” I asked.

“No; but we do say: Dum it,” she replied, inhaling the smoke as if she were a veteran, but betraying her novitiate by the severe attack of coughing which followed.

“Well, I am not up to it, quite,” she remarked. “You see I didn’t begin till my senior year in college, and gave it up during the earlier years of my married life.”

Then I, a college professor, who has lived these many deluded years in the belief that not even his senior boys smoked, except perhaps when no one was looking—gasped and became speechless. Seeing me so easily shocked, she tried to shock me more by telling tales of social depravity, of divorces, remarriages and more divorces, of which she had one; until my speechlessness nearly ended in vocal paralysis.

I did not find my voice again until a gentleman from Boston who “never drank in Boston,” but who, it seemed, departed from that custom to an alarming degree on shipboard, helped me to recover my lost organ, by launching forth into a tirade against the immigrant, that ready scapegoat for all our national sins.

Upon the immigrant the Boston man laid the blame for the degeneration of America and the Americans.

“What can you expect of our country with this scum of the earth coming in by the million? Black Hands, Socialists, and Anarchists? What can you expect?

“The Sabbath is broken down by them as if it had never been a day of rest. They drink like fish, they live on nothing——” and he went on with his contradictory statements until the well-known end, in which he saw our country ruined, our flag in the dust, liberty dethroned and the Constitution of the United States trampled under the feet of these