range flowers in a
level field, broke into a universal tremor, and the air above them was
filled with hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the flight of birds rising
from the field.

The Marches tried to make out their son's face; they believed that they
did; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother said
that she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though she
was glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural that
he should not, when everybody else was saying good-by.

On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased to
have the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like an
impressionistic study. As the ship swung free of the shed and got into
the stream, the shore lost reality. Up to a certain moment, all was still
New York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and monstrous
shows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself at sea and
on the way to Europe.

The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the
deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in the
best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily
verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores,
while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, and
as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless.
A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flying
down the promenade from the steerage. "Capitan! Capitan! There is a
woman!" he shouted in nondescript English. "She must go hout! She must go
hout!" Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship's command and seemed
to penetrate to the ship's heart; she stopped, as if with a sort of
majestic relenting. A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to it;
the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawled
safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved
seaward again.

"What is it? Oh, what is it?" his wife demanded of March's share of their
common ignorance. A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the
tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left three
little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid some
friends on board good-by.

He passed on, and Mrs. March said, "What a charming face he had!" even
before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought
sympathy which makes g