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Updated: June 26, 2025
"A lieutenant-commander, if you please," interposed Christy with a smile. "Then you are the ranking officer, Captain Passford, for both of the other commanders are lieutenants," added the executive officer of the Muskegon. "We are ready to transmit your orders to our superiors."
It's the only good thing I have to say for Muskegon Commercial College, that we were all, even the small fry, deeply mortified to be posted as defaulters; and the collapse of a merchant prince like Billson, who had ridden pretty high in his days of prosperity, was, of course, particularly hard to bear.
All he had been able to do thus far was to regard every newcomer to the town with a steely eye of distrust; to watch each one furtively, to shadow him in his walks, and to believe during his sojourn that he might be "Red Mike, alias James K. Brown, wanted for safe-breaking at Muskegon, Michigan; reward, $1000," or some like desperado.
And now I have to introduce a new character that never said a word nor wagged a finger, and yet shaped my whole subsequent career. You have crossed the States, so that in all likelihood you have seen the head of it, parcel-gilt and curiously fluted, rising among trees from a wide plain; for this new character was no other than the State capitol of Muskegon, then first projected.
In the center of this whirlpool of iniquity stood the Catacombs as the hub from which lesser spokes in the wheel radiated. Any old logger of the Saginaw Valley can tell you of the Catacombs, just as any old logger of any other valley will tell you of the "Pen," the "White Row," the "Water Streets" of Alpena, Port Huron, Ludington, Muskegon, and a dozen other lumber towns.
Several times already, when I had been speaking of myself, he had pulled out a writing-pad and scribbled a brief note; and now, when we entered the studio, I saw it in his hand again, and the pencil go to his mouth, as he cast a comprehensive glance round the uncomfortable building. "Are you going to make a sketch of it?" I could not help asking, as I unveiled the Genius of Muskegon.
To strangers I was presented with consideration; and the account given of "my American brother-in-law, poor Janie's man, James K. Dodd, the well-known millionnaire of Muskegon," was calculated to enlarge the heart of a proud son. An aged assistant of my grandfather's, a pleasant, humble creature with a taste for whiskey, was at first deputed to be my guide about the city.
The energy and aptitude which I displayed throughout delighted and surprised my father, and I believe, although I say it, whose tongue should be tied, that they alone prevented Muskegon capitol from being the eyesore of my native State. Altogether, I was in a cheery frame of mind when I returned to the commercial college; and my earlier operations were crowned with a full measure of success.
Had I done so, the glamour must have fled: I should still have been but Loudon Dodd; whereas now I was a Latin Quarter student, Murger's successor, living in flesh and blood the life of one of those romances I had loved to read, to re-read, and to dream over, among the woods of Muskegon. At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the Latin Quarter.
Five hundred I reserved for my own immediate necessities; the rest I mailed inside of the week to my father at Muskegon, where they came in time to pay his funeral expenses. The news of his death was scarcely a surprise and scarce a grief to me. I could not conceive my father a poor man.
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