Dick Sand, when he should reach his full growth, would not exceed middle height, but he was well built.  One could not doubt that he was of Anglo-Saxon origin.  He was brown, however, with blue eyes, in which the crystalline sparkled with ardent fire.  His seaman’s craft had already prepared him well for the conflicts of life.  His intelligent physiognomy breathed forth energy.  It was not that of an audacious person, it was that of a darer.  These three words from an unfinished verse of Virgil are often cited: 

     “Audaces fortuna juvat"....

but they are quoted incorrectly.  The poet said: 

     “Audentes fortuna juvat"....

It is on the darers, not on the audacious, that Fortune almost always smiled.  The audacious may be unguarded.  The darer thinks first, acts afterwards.  There is the difference!

Dick Sand was audens.

At fifteen he already knew how to take a part, and to carry out to the end whatever his resolute spirit had decided upon.  His manner, at once spirited and serious, attracted attention.  He did not squander himself in words and gestures, as boys of his age generally do.  Early, at a period of life when they seldom discuss the problems of existence, he had looked his miserable condition in the face, and he had promised “to make” himself.

And he had made himself—­being already almost a man at an age when others are still only children.

At the same time, very nimble, very skilful in all physical exercises, Dick Sand was one of those privileged beings, of whom it may be said that they were born with two left feet and two right hands.  In that way, they do everything with the right hand, and always set out with the left foot.

Public charity, it has been said, had brought up the little orphan.  He had been put first in one of those houses for children, where there is always, in America, a place for the little waifs.  Then at four, Dick learned to read, write and count in one of those State of New York schools, which charitable subscriptions maintain so generously.

At eight, the taste for the sea, which Dick had from birth, caused him to embark as cabin-boy on a packet ship of the South Sea.  There he learned the seaman’s trade, and as one ought to learn it, from the earliest age.  Little by little he instructed himself under the direction of officers who were interested in this little old man.  So the cabin-boy soon became the novice, expecting something better, of course.  The child who understands, from the beginning, that work is the law of life, the one who knows, from an early age, that he will gain his bread only by the sweat of his brow—­a Bible precept which is the rule of humanity—­that one is probably intended for great things; for some day he will have, with the will, the strength to accomplish them.

It was, when he was a cabin-boy on board a merchant vessel, that Dick Sand was remarked by Captain Hull.  This honest seaman immediately formed a friendship with this honest young boy, and later he made him known to the ship-owner, James W. Weldon.  The latter felt a lively interest in this orphan, whose education he completed at San Francisco, and he had him brought up in the Catholic religion, to which his family adhered.