Quotes by Joseph C. Lincoln

As my mother and 1 were alone in the world, and as I was to be a business man, it was decided that I had better not waste time in going to college.

At that moment Mr. Clifford, quite unconscious that he and his most personal feelings and aspirations were subjects of discussion, was turning from the main road into the lower road.

But very unfortunately the merchant marine died away till even the majority of fishing done about the Cape is in the hands of the Portuguese who emigrated to the Cape some fifty years ago.

Captain Newcomb lit a cigar and strolled slowly toward the post office, staring about him as he walked and trying to pick out places or buildings which he remembered.

In 1904 my first novel, 'Cap'n Eri' was published. Other novels have followed with fairly annual regularity. They have all centered about Cape Cod and its people, for having thoroughly mastered the psychology of a type of American that was known, appreciated, though through an economic law, fast becoming extinct, it seems better to keep on picturing these people.

My Cape women are generally true to type - big hearted, motherly women who love the sea. My other characters, with the exception of the Portuguese, who I occasionally mention as Cape dwellers, are obviously drawn from the city types one sees in everyday life.

My father was a sea captain, so was his father, and his father before him, and all my uncles. My mother's people all followed the sea. I suppose that if I had been born a few years earlier, I would have had my own ship.

Now that very morning, after breakfast, at the post office, these two young people had met by chance, and there Miss Barstow had spoken of her errand to the dressmaker's and of her intention of walking instead of riding, and that she should probably start for the walk about half-past one that afternoon.

Of all the sea captains, however, those that I knew best were those who were actually sailing in the '70's and '8o's - and who were largely engaged in carrying oranges and lemons from Mediterranean ports. These men were really the last of our sailing captains.

That was in the days when everyone rode a bicycle, and the journal had a circulation of over one hundred and twenty-five thousand weekly, so my verses and illustrations became known to a fairly large public.

The captain repressed a smile. Mr. Burgess' pride in the fact that the news of his good fortune had been put in the newspapers was so very evident.

The type of sea captain who figures in my stories has not necessarily an accurately corresponding type in my acquaintance. Going back to the Cape after having lived in New York and Boston, I was able to get varying angles on the lives of men and women I had known from childhood.

Well, I ought to know the folk of Cape Cod. I was born there, in Brewster, lived there all my youth, and since leaving, I can't remember ever having missed visiting the Cape during the year. Sometimes I've only gone there for a few days, often for months, but I always go back - I suppose that it's the call of my blood.

Whether the type of old sea captain that I have portrayed in my stories is gone forever, is a question. Certainly each summer I find that the ranks have perceptibly thinned. The longshore captain is still there, many of the men who are not any older than myself, but their viewpoint is not that of a man who sailed his square rigged ship out one morning with China as his destination.

Will it keep up? Time only can answer that question. One thing is certain, however, if the United States is to have another set of men as were represented by the Sea Captains (and I am not limiting this remark to the men in any set locality) of the days of the clipper ship, they will have to be bred.

Yes, dinner at the Mansion House was over. Mrs. Euphemia Hobbs, hostess of the establishment, declared to Miss Ethelinda Doane, who washed dishes and waited on the table, that she was thankful for it. I'm always thankful, said Mrs. Hobbs, when another meal's done with and out of the way. Miss Doane said that she, too, was thankful.