at was in him to say; and every
moment when he was not writing he chafed to get back to his book again.
Indeed, it was but his body which parted from the manuscript even when
he ate, or walked, or slept. His real self was writing on and on, every
instant, after he had gone to bed, and most of all, while he dreamed.
The idea for the book, when it sprang into his mind, was full-grown as
Minerva born from the brain of Jove. Denin felt as if he were a
sculptor who sees his statue buried deep in a marble block, and has but
to hew away the stone to set the image free. He got up each morning at
dawn, bathed, dressed hurriedly, and worked till breakfast time, when a
cup of tea and a piece of bread were all he wanted or felt he had time
to take. Then, in some out-of-the-way, uncomfortable corner where his
fellow travelers of the steerage were not likely to interrupt him, he
wrote on often till evening, without stopping to eat at noon. He used
ship's stationery begged from the second class, sheets off his own
drawing pads, and small blank books that happened to be for sale in the
wonderful collection of things ships' barbers always have. Sometimes he
scribbled fast with one pencil after another: sometimes he scratched
painfully along with a bad pen. But nothing mattered, if he could
write. And nothing disturbed him; no noise of yelling laughter, no
shouting game, no crying of babies, nor blowing of bugles.

"When that chap's got his nose to his paper, he wouldn't hear Gabriel's
trump," one man said of him to another. Everybody asked everybody else
what he was doing when he suddenly stopped his traffic of portraits;
but nobody dared put such a question to him. Some people guessed that
he was a journalist in disguise, who had been in the war-zone, and was
working against time to get his experiences onto paper before the ship
docked at New York. But, as a matter of fact, it did not occur to Denin
to wonder when he should finish until, suddenly and to his own
surprise, the strange story he had been writing--if it could be called
a story--came to its inevitable climax. His message was finished. There
was no more that he wished to say.

This was at twelve o'clock one night, and the next morning at six the
ship passed the Statue of Liberty.

Denin felt dazed among his fellow emigrants, all of whom were of a
different class in life from his, and all of whom seemed to have
something definite to expect, something which filled them with