y had the right to be shining and happy, for was
their owner not with her (for the present) Man, her Gentleman Friend
and holder of the keys to the enchanted city of fun?

Blinker did not read her look accurately, but by some miracle he
suddenly saw Coney aright.

He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys. He now
looked clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists. Their
offenses were wiped out. Counterfeit and false though the garish
joys of these spangled temples were, he perceived that deep
under the gilt surface they offered saving and apposite balm and
satisfaction to the restless human heart. Here, at least, was the
husk of Romance, the empty but shining casque of Chivalry, the
breath-catching though safe-guarded dip and flight of Adventure, the
magic carpet that transports you to the realms of fairyland, though
its journey be through but a few poor yards of space. He no longer
saw a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal. There was no magic
of poesy here or of art; but the glamour of their imagination turned
yellow calico into cloth of gold and the megaphones into the silver
trumpets of joy's heralds.

Almost humbled, Blinker rolled up the shirt sleeves of his mind and
joined the idealists.

"You are the lady doctor," he said to Florence. "How shall we go
about doing this jolly conglomeration of fairy tales, incorporated?"

"We will begin there," said the Princess, pointing to a fun pagoda
on the edge of the sea, "and we will take them all in, one by one."

They caught the eight o'clock returning boat and sat, filled with
pleasant fatigue, against the rail in the bow, listening to the
Italians' fiddle and harp. Blinker had thrown off all care. The
North Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness. What a fuss
he had made over signing his name--pooh! he could sign it a hundred
times. And her name was as pretty as she was--"Florence," he said it
to himself a great many times.

As the boat was nearing its pier in the North River a two-funnelled,
drab, foreign-looking sea-going steamer was dropping down toward the
bay. The boat turned its nose in toward its slip. The steamer veered
as if to seek midstream, and then yawed, seemed to increase its
speed and struck the Coney boat on the side near the stern, cutting
into it with a terrifying shock and crash.

While the six hundred passengers on the boat were mostly tumbling
about the decks in a shrieking panic the captain was shouting at