it quite back."

This little talk left me deeply disturbed. But I was unwilling to give
up my plan, and so, after some anxious thinking, I decided to free-lance
it. After all, if this one story didn't sell I could borrow until I
wrote something that did. And I set to work with an angry vim. The very
thought that my old world was closing up behind me made my mind the more
ready now for the new world opening ahead.

From the old house in Brooklyn I once more explored my harbor. All day
and the greater part of each night I went back over my old ground. Old
memories rose in sharp contrast to new views I was getting. From the top
I had come to the bottom. Crowds of sweating laborers rose everywhere
between me and my past. And as between me and my past, and between these
masses and their rulers, I felt the struggle drawing near, the whole
immense region took on for me the aspect of a battlefield, with puffs
and clouds and darting lines of smoke and steam from its ships and
trains and factories. Through it I moved confusedly, troubled and
absorbed.

I saw the work of the harbor go now with an even mightier rush, because
of the impending strike. The rumor of its coming had spread far over the
country, and shippers were hurrying cargoes in. I saw boxes and barrels
by thousands marked "Rush." And they were rushed! On one dock I saw the
dockers begin at seven in the morning and when I came back late in the
evening the same men were there. At midnight I went home to sleep. When
I came back at daybreak the same men were there, and I watched them
straining through the last rush until the ship sailed that day at noon.
They had worked for twenty-nine hours. In that last hour I drew
close--so close that I could feel them heaving, sweating, panting, feel
their laboring hearts and lungs. Long ago I had watched them thus, but
then I had seen from a different world. I had felt the pulse of a nation
beating and I had gloried in its speed. But now I felt the pulse-beats
of exhausted straining men, I saw that undertaker's sign staring fixedly
from across the way. "_Certainly_ I'm talking to you!" Six thousand
killed and injured!

I saw accidents that week. I saw a Polish docker knocked on the head by
the end of a heavy chain that broke. I saw a little Italian caught by
the foot in a rope net, swung yelling with terror into the air, then
dropped--his leg was broken. And toward the end of a long night's work I
saw a tired man slip and fall w