by a port," he told me at the end of our
talk. "A complicated industrial organ, the heart of a country's
circulation, pumping in and out its millions of tons of traffic as
quickly and cheaply as possible. That's efficiency, scientific
management or just plain engineering, whatever you want to call it. But
it's got to be done for us all in a plan instead of each for himself in
a blind struggling chaos."

* * * * *

I came down from the tower with a dazed, excited feeling which lasted
all the rest of the day. That harbor of confusion had been for months my
entire world, it had baffled and beaten me till I was weak. And now this
man had swept together all its parts and showed me one immense design.

He had promised me the first use of his plans. With this to go on I
drafted a scheme for a series of magazine articles on "The First Port of
the World," and I soon placed it in advance at four hundred dollars an
article. At last I was coming up in life, my first big story had begun!

I went with Dillon each week-end up to the cottage on the Sound. Here he
talked in detail of his dreams, and Eleanore with her old passion and
pride delighted to draw him out for me. And not only her father--for to
help me in my work she invited out here in the evenings many of his
engineer friends.

"It has always been awfully hard for me," she confided, "to understand
big questions by reading about them out of books. But I love to hear
about them from men who are living and working right in them. I love to
feel a little how it must be to be living their lives."

She was a wonderful listener, for she had quietly studied each man until
now she had a kind of an instinct for drawing the very best of him out.
While he talked she would sit with her sewing, now and then putting in a
question to help. Often I would glance at her there and see in her
slightly frowning face how intently she was listening, thinking and
planning to help me. Sometimes she would meet my look. I would grow
tremendously happy.

"In a little while," I thought. But then I would pull myself up with a
jerk: "Stop looking at her, you young fool, keep your mind on this
engineer. You've got the chance of your life right now to make good in
your work and be happy. Don't fall down! Get busy!"

And I did. I threw myself into the lives of these men who were the
living embodiments of all that bigness, boldness, punch that had so
gripped and thrilled m