on the docks. And all belonged to the harbor.

Their work I learned was to load the ships whose masts and spars peeped
up at me over the warehouse roofs. From my nursery window above I could
see them better. Sometimes they had large white sails and then they
moved off somewhere. I could see them go, these tall ships, with their
sails making low, mysterious sounds, flappings, spankings and deep
boomings. The men on them sang the weirdest songs as they pulled all
together at the ropes. Some of these songs brought a lump in your
throat. Where were they going? "To heathen lands," Belle told me. What
did she mean? I was just going to ask her. But then I stopped--I did not
dare! From up the river, under the sweeping arch of that Great Bridge
which seemed high as the clouds, came more tall ships, and low
"steamers" belching smoke and "tugs" and "barges" and "ferry boats." The
names of all these I learned from Belle and Anny the cook and my mother.
And all were going "to heathen lands." What in the world did Belle mean
by that?

Once I thought I had it. I saw that some of these smaller boats were
just going across the river and stopping at the land over there, a land
so crowded with buildings you could barely see into it at all. "Is that
a heathen land?" I asked her. "Yes!" said Belle. And she laughed. She
was Scotch and very religious. But later I heard her call it "New York"
and say she was going there herself to buy herself some corsets. And so
I was even more puzzled than ever. For some deep instinct told me you
could buy no corsets in "heathen land"--least of all Belle's corsets.

She often spoke of "the ocean," too, another place where the tall ships
went. But what was the ocean? "It's like a lake, but mightier," Belle
had said. But what was a lake? It was all so vague and confusing. Always
it came back to this, that I had no more seen the "ocean" than I had
seen a "heathen land," and so I did not know them.

But I knew the harbor by day and by night, on bright sunny days and in
fogs and rains, in storms of wind, in whirling snow, and under the
restful stars at night that twinkled down from so far above, while the
shadowy region below twinkled back with stars of its own, restless,
many-colored stars, yellow, green and red and blue, moving, dancing,
flaring, dying. And all these stars had voices, too. By night in my bed
I could hear them--hoots and shrieks from ferries and tugs, hoarse
coughs from engines along the doc