n, the sick woman from the
steerage and, with Mrs. Liebling's consent, Siegfried's corpse were taken
from the _Hamburg_. Frederick saw to it that Mrs. Liebling remained in
her cabin and was spared the too painful scene. Within half an hour, the
gallant _Hamburg_ was steaming at full speed through the Narrows into the
magnificent Upper Bay.

Long before it appears, travellers are always on the lookout with
spy-glasses for the Statue of Liberty, the gift of the French nation.
Even Frederick, when he beheld the goddess towering up from the water
on her star-shaped base, did homage to her in his thoughts. From the
distance at which he saw her, she did not look so gigantic. She seemed
to be sending him a beautiful message, rather of the future than of the
present, a message that found its way to his heart and, even in the
strange mood he was in, expanded his breast.

"Liberty!" The word may be misused, yet it has not lost any of its magic
or promise.

LX

And now, suddenly, the world seemed to Frederick to have gone mad. The
_Hamburg_ was entering the narrow harbour, the basin surrounded by
skyscrapers, veritable towers of Babel, and alive with numberless
grotesquely shaped ferry-boats. The scene, perhaps, would be a ridiculous
monstrosity, were it not so truly gigantic. In that crater of life
civilisation bellows, howls, screeches, roars, thunders, rushes, whizzes
and whirls. Here is a colony of white ants, whose activity is staggering,
bewildering, stupefying. It seemed inconceivable that in that intricate,
raging chaos, a single minute could pass without a collision, or a
collapse, or a killing. How could one possibly pursue one's own affairs
quietly amid that shrieking, that hammering, that clanging, that mad
uproar?

During these last moments together, the involuntary passengers of the
_Hamburg_ had become as one in heart and soul. Frederick had not lost his
cash in the disaster, and he persuaded Ingigerd Hahlstroem not to reject
his services during her first days on land. All agreed not to lose sight
of one another in New York. Naturally enough, there had been much lively,
genuinely heartfelt leave-taking and well-wishing for more than an hour
before the _Hamburg_ was secured to the dock.

The dithyrambic noise of the mighty city, where millions of men were at
work, exercised a renewing, transforming influence. It was a whirlpool
into which one was drawn unresistingly. It suffered no pondering, no
immer