Piously they decorated the sails of their crafts and blazoned their war shields with the sign of the cross.  They kidnapped holy priests (for otherwise they came not), and taking them aboard their ships, they sailed to their several ports.  Then they forced the unwilling Fathers to unite them in holy wedlock to the maidens of their choice.  To many havens they sailed, and in every one they had an only wife.  They made their priests inscribe texts from the holy Gospel on pieces of parchment made from the skin of hogs, and instead of robbing people, as of yore, they paid with the word of Holy Scripture for the booty they levied.  This, they said, was infinitely more precious than any worldly dross.  All hail to the memory of my gallant maternal ancestor, who, when surfeited with the caresses of his Fifine of Normandy, flew to the arms of Mercedes of Andalusia.  Next, perhaps, he appeared in Greenland, blubbering with an Esquimau heiress.  Anon, you might have found him in Columbia in the tolls of a princely Pocahontas.  In Mexico he ate the ardent chile from the tender hand of his Guadalupita, and later on he was on time at a five o’clock family tea party in Japan, or he might have kotowed pidgin-love to a trusting maid in a China town of fair Cathay.  In Africa—­oh, horror!—­here I draw the veil, for in my mind’s eye I behold a burly negro (yes, sah!) staring at me out of fishy, blue eyes.  It is said of these gallant rovers of the seas that they were subject to a peculiar malady when on shore.  It caused them to stagger and swagger, use violent language, and deport themselves not unlike people who are seized with mal de mer, or sickness of the sea.  When attacked by this failing, their wives would cast them bodily into the holds of their ships and start them out to sea, where they soon recovered their usual health and equilibrium and continued on their rounds.  They were the first of all commercial travelers and the hardiest, jolliest and most prosperous—­but they did not hoard their earnings.

My uncle conducted a store, selling merchandise of every description.  Dutch uncle though he was to me, I must give him thanks for the careful business training he bestowed on me.  I say with pride that I proved to be his most apt and willing pupil.  He taught me how the natives, by nature simple-minded and unsophisticated, had lost all confidence in their fellow-men in general and merchants in particular through the, to say the least, very dubious and suspicious dealings of the tribes of Israel.  My uncle said he was an old timer in New Mexico, but the Jew was there already when he came and, added he, thoughtfully, “I believe the Jews came to America with Columbus.”  With a pack of merchandise strapped to his back, this king of commerce crossed the plains in the face of murderous Indians and with the unexplainable, crafty cunning of his race, he sold tobacco and trinkets to the warriors who had set out to kill him, and to the squaws he sold Parisian lingerie at a bargain.  He swore that he was losing money and selling the goods below cost, not counting the freight.