remember there came a harsh
scream from a freight engine close outside. And I looked out of the
window.

The harbor of big companies, uglier than I had ever seen it, no longer
dotted with white sails, but clouded with the smoke and soot of an age
of steam, and iron, lay sprawled out there like a thing alive. Always
changing, always growing, it had crushed the life out of my father and
mother, and now it was ready for Sue and me.

"I've got to stay here and make money."

Good-by to the Beautiful City of Grays. A clock in an outer room struck
five. In Paris it was ten o'clock, and those friends of mine from all
countries were crowding into "The Dirty Spoon." I could see them
sauntering one by one on that summer's night down the gay old Boulevard
Saint Michel and dropping into their seats at the table in the corner.

"How am I to make money? By writing?"

I thought of De Maupassant and the rest, and the two years I had spent
in trying to make vivid and real the life I had seen. In these last
anxious weeks I had sent some of my Paris sketches to magazine offices
in New York. They had all been returned with printed slips of rejection,
except in one case where the editor wrote, "This is a good piece of
writing, but the subject is too remote. Why not try something nearer
home?"

"All right," I thought, "what's near me here? Let's see. There's a cloud
of yellow smoke I can do, with a brand-new tug below it dragging a
string of good big barges. What are they loaded with? Standard Oil. Wait
till they get closer and I can even describe the smell! No," I concluded
savagely. "Let's keep my writing clean out of this hole and get the
money some other way!"

Then suddenly I forgot myself and thought of my stern brave old dad.
What under the sun was he going to do?

That week he mortgaged our house on the Heights for five thousand
dollars. With this he paid off all his debts and put the balance in the
bank. Then from the big dock company he got a job in his own warehouse
at a hundred dollars a month.

"Kind of 'em," he said gruffly. He was sixty-five years old. They were
even kind enough to add to that a job for me. I sat at the desk next to
his and I was paid ten dollars a week.

Sue let the servants go, hired one green German girl and said she knew
she could run the house on a hundred and twenty dollars a month. But the
August bills went over that, so we drew money out of the bank. My father
had bronchitis that week. We m