"Yet is remembrance sweet,
Though well I know
The days of childhood
Are but days of woe;
Some rude restraint,
Some petty tyrant sours
What else should be
Our sweetest blithest hours."
These lugubrious lines found no echo in the early life of Donald McKay, for his boyhood was passed in earnest, healthy toil, and filled with a keen desire for knowledge, while his manhood had known the joy of well-earned success.
After the Abbott Lawrence, Mr. McKay built the medium clippers Minnehaha, Baltic, Adriatic, Mastiff, and barque Henry Hill, all in 1856; the Alhambra, 1857; the Helen Morris, and second Sovereign of the Seas, 1868, and the Glory of the Seas, 1869. During the Civil War, he built for the United States Government, the iron gunboat Ashuelot, the ironclad monitor Nausett, the wooden gunboats Trefoil, and Yucca, and the sloop of war Adams. In 1877 he retired to his farm at Hamilton, Massachusetts, and there he died, September 20, 1880, in the seventy-first year of his age.
Donald McKay was a man of untiring energy and industry. He was a rapid and skilful draughtsman and designed and superintended the construction of every vessel that he built. This may also be said of almost every ship-builder of that period, but Mr. McKay's skill, the result of an intuitive perception ripened by experience, gave him a peculiar insight
