To-day its old-time ports are deserted by traffic.

Stripped of all that had salable value, its ships rot on mud-banks or at moldering wharves.

The New England boy, whose ambition half a century ago was to ship on a whaler, with a boy's lay and a straight path to the quarter-deck, now goes into a city office, or makes for the West as a miner or a railroad man.

The whale bids fair to become as extinct as the dodo, and the whaleman is already as rare as the buffalo.
[Illustration: "ROT AT MOLDERING WHARVES"] With the extension of the fishing-grounds to the Pacific began the really great days of the whale fishery.

Then, from such a port as Nantucket or New Bedford a vessel would set out, to be gone three years, carrying with her the dearest hopes and ambitions of all the inhabitants.