evedores there began bawling out names,
gang after gang of men stepped forward, until at last the chosen throngs
went marching in past the timekeepers. Hungrily I peered after them up
the long cavernous docksheds. "No Visitors Admitted."

Then I went into a lunchroom for ham and eggs and a huge cup of coffee.
I ate an enormous breakfast. On the floor beside me a cross and weary
looking old woman was scrubbing the dirty oil cloth there. But I myself
felt no weariness. While all was still vivid and fresh in my mind,
sitting there I wrote down what I had seen. A magazine editor said it
would do. And so we paid the butcher.

The same editor gave me a sweeping letter of introduction to all ocean
liners. This I showed to a dock watchman, who directed me upstairs. In
the office above I showed it to a clerk, who directed me to the dock
superintendent, who read it and told me to go downtown. I recalled what
Dillon had said about strings. Here was string number one, I reflected,
and I followed it down Manhattan into the tall buildings, only to be
asked down there just what it was I wanted to know.

"I don't want to know anything," I replied. "I just want permission to
watch the work."

"We can't allow that," was the answer of this harbor of big companies.

At every pier that I approached I received about the same reply. At home
Sue spoke of other bills. And now that I was in trouble, hard pressed
for money and groping my way about alone, I found myself missing
Eleanore to a most desperate degree. Her face, her smiling blue-gray
eyes, kept rising in my mind, sometimes with memories and hopes that
permeated my whole view both of the harbor and my work with a warm glad
expectant glow, but more often with no feeling at all but one of
sickening emptiness. She was not here. The only way to get back to her
was to make good with her father. And so I would not ask his aid or even
go to him for advice. Testing me, was he? All right, I would show him.

And I returned to my editor, whom my intensity rather amused.

"The joke of it is," he said, "that they think down there you're a
muckraker."

"I'll be one soon if this keeps on."

"But it won't," he replied. "As soon as you've once broken in, and they
see it's a glory story you want, you can't imagine how nice they'll be."

"I haven't broken in," I said.

"You will to-morrow," he told me, "because Abner Bell will be with you.
He's our star photographer. Wait till you see little A