ateful to me for what help I had given; he now agreed to
take me on his tug, where there was plenty of simple work which I did
for a dollar a day and my board. And at once I felt a difference. The
light work steadied my overwrought nerves and unlocked my mind which had
set tight. And now at last I began to see my way out of the jungle.

For the tug belonged to a row of piers about a mile to the southward.
Brand new gigantic piers they were, with solid rows of factory buildings
on the shore behind them, all owned by one great company, which rented
floors or parts of floors to hundreds of manufacturers here. The raw
materials they required were landed from barges or ships at the piers
and delivered to their doors at once, and their finished products were
conveyed in the same way to all parts of the world. Here was a key to
the future port of ordered combination that Eleanore's father was
working toward. Here was the place I must write up before he came back
from abroad, to show him that I had found it.

And the very certainty of this increased my exasperation. For even still
I could not write. Doggedly I worked at night up there in my room in the
tenement, but I wrote the most tedious dismal stuff which I would tear
up savagely. Inanely I would pound my head as though to put punch into
it.

But another miracle happened to me.

On one of those enormous piers, roofed over, dim and cool inside, I
stood one day looking out on the deck of an East Indian freighter, where
two half-naked Malays were polishing the brasswork. One of them was a
boy of ten. His small face was uncouth and primitive almost as some
little ape's, but I saw him look up again and again with a sudden
gleaming expectancy. I grew curious and waited. Now the looks came
oftener, his every move was restless. And after a time another boy, a
little New York "newsie," with a pack of evening papers, came loitering
along the pier. Unconcernedly up the gang-plank he went, while the Malay
crouched in his corner, rigid and tense, his black eyes fixed. The white
boy took no notice. Climbing up a ladder he sold a couple of papers to
some officers on a deck above, and then he went down again to the dock.
Presently one of the officers yawned and threw his paper over the rail,
and as it fell to the lower deck in an instant the Malay boy was upon
it, devouring its headlines and its pictures with his animal eyes, with
one of his small bare brown feet upon the jeweled bosom