ourse it was. But what a _rich mine_ of ugliness
for the pen of a rising young author like me!

CHAPTER VII

Now for something bigger. I would have a whack at the place by day. No
mystery now, just ugliness. I would show it up in broad daylight,
bringing out every detail in the glare. I would do this by comparing it
to the harbor of long ago, and the snowy white sails of my father's
youth.

His youth was gone. A thick-set and gray-headed old figure, he bent over
his desk by my side, putting up a fierce, silent fight for his strength,
and now slowly getting enough of it back to keep him at his job as a
clerk in what had been his warehouse. Only once, coming suddenly into
the room, I found him settled deep down in his chair, heavy, inert, his
cigar gone out, staring vacantly out of the window.

The sails were gone. Down there at his dock, where even in days that I
could remember the tall clippers had lain for weeks, I saw now a German
whaleback. She had slipped in but three days before and was already
snorting to get away. She was black and she wallowed deep, and she had
an enormous bulging belly into which I descended one day and explored
its metallic compartments that echoed to the deafening din of some
riveters at work on her sides. Though short and stout, she was nine
thousand tons. Hideous, she was practical, as practical as a factory. In
her the romance of the sea was buried and choked in smoke and steam, in
grime, dirt, noise and a regular haste. One morning as her din increased
and the black, sooty breath of her came drifting in through our window,
my father rose abruptly and slammed the window down.

"The damn sea hog!" he muttered.

Gone, too, were the American sailors. All races of men on the earth but
ours seemed gathered around this hog of the sea. From barges filled with
her cargo, the stuff was being heaved up on the dock by a lot of Irish
bargemen. Italian dockers rolled it across to this German ship, and on
deck a Jap under-officer was bossing a Coolie crew. These Coolies were
dwarfs with big white teeth and stooping, round little shoulders. They
had strange, nervous faces, long and narrow with high cheek bones and no
foreheads at all to speak of. Their black eyes gleamed. Back and forth
they scurried to the sound of that guttural Japanese voice.

"The cheapest sea labor there is," growled Dad. "Good-by to Yankee
sailors."

The Old East with its riches was no longer here. For what were th