, like a length of Piccadilly. It
approached end-on to where I stood, and at last impinged. It actually
was a length of street, and I could continue my walk. The street
floated off again into the night, with me, Jimmy's father and mother,
and all of us, and the vans and motor-cars; and the other square end of
it soon joined a roadway on the opposite shore. The dark river was as
full of mobile lengths of bright roadway as Oxford Circus is of
motor-buses; and the fear of the unknown, as in the terrific dark of a
dream where flaming comets stream on undirected courses, numbed my
little mind. I had found New York.

I had found it. Its bulk was beyond the mind, its lights were falling
star systems, and its movements those of general cataclysm. I should
find no care for little human needs there. One cannot warm one's hands
against the flames of earthquake. There is no provision for men in the
welter, but dimly apprehended in the night, of blind and inhuman
powers.

Therefore, the hotel bedroom, when I got to it, surprised and steadied
me with its elaborate care for the body. But yet I was not certain.
Then I saw against the wall a dial, and reading a notice over it I
learned that by working the hands of this false clock correctly I could
procure anything, from an apple to the fire brigade. Now this was
carrying matters to the other extreme; and I had to suppress a desire
to laugh hysterically. I set the hands to a number; waited one minute;
then the door opened, and a waiter came in with a real tray, conveying
a glass and a bottle. So there was a method then in this general
madness after all. I tried to regard the wonder as indifferently as the
waiter's own cold and measuring eyes.

_March 1910._

X. The Derelict

In a tramp steamer, which was overloaded, and in midwinter, I had
crossed to America for the first time. What we experienced of the
western ocean during that passage gave me so much respect for it that
the prospect of the return journey, three thousand miles of those seas
between me and home, was already a dismal foreboding. The shipping
posters of New York, showing stately liners too lofty even to notice
the Atlantic, were arguments good enough for steerage passengers, who
do, I know, reckon a steamer's worth by the number of its funnels; but
the pictures did nothing to lessen my regard for that dark outer world
I knew. And having no experience of ships installed with racquet
courts, Parisian cafes,