ent countries representing
millions of seamen. And this crude world parliament, this international
brotherhood, had placed itself on record as against wars of every kind,
except the one deepening bitter war of labor against capital. To further
this they had proposed to paralyze by strikes the whole international
transport world. The first had followed promptly, breaking out in
England. The second was to take place here.

"You don't see how it can happen," said Marsh, with one of those keen
sudden looks that showed he was aware of my presence. "You admit this
place is a watery hell, but you don't believe we can change it. You
don't see how ignorant mobs of men can rise up and take the whole game
in their hands. Do I get you right?"

"You do," I said.

"Look over there."

I followed his glance to the doorway. It was filled with a group of big
ragged men. Some of the faces were black with soot, some were smiling
stolidly, some scowling in the effort to hear. All eyes were intent on
the face of the man who had never been known to lose a strike.

"That's the beginning," Marsh told me. "You keep your eyes on their
faces--from now on right into the strike--and you may see something grow
there that'll give you a new religion."

As the day wore into evening the crowd from outside pressed into the
room until they were packed all around us.

"Let's get out of this," said Joe at last. We went to a neighboring
lunchroom and ate a hasty supper. But as here, too, the crowd pressed in
to get a look at Marsh, Joe asked us to come up to his room.

"They _know_ your room," Marsh answered. His tone was grim, as though he
had been accustomed for years to this ceaselessly curious pressing mass,
pressing, pressing around him tight. "Suppose we go up to mine," he
said. "I want you fellows to meet my wife. She has never met any writers
before," he added to me, "and she's interested in that kind of thing.
She was a music teacher once."

I was about to decline and start for home, but suddenly I recalled
Eleanore's saying that she would like to meet Mrs. Marsh. So I accepted
his invitation. And what I saw a few minutes later brought me down
abruptly from these world-wide schemes for labor.

We entered a small, cheap hotel, climbed a flight of stairs and came
into the narrow bedroom which was for the moment this notorious
wanderer's home. A little girl about six years old lay asleep on a cot
in one corner, and under the one electric lig