r its wheels, and its old white horse with his shaggy
head down came plodding wearily along. He alone had no strike feeling.

Battered and worn from the day's impressions I wanted to be alone and to
think. I made my way in and out among trucks and around a dockshed out
to a slip. It was filled with barges, tugs and floats jammed in between
the two big vessels that loomed one at either pier. It was a dark jumble
of spars and masts, derricks, funnels and cabin roofs, all shadowy and
silent. A single light gleamed here and there from the long dark deck of
the Morgan coaster close to my right. She was heavily loaded still, for
she had come to dock too late. Smoke still drifted from her stout
funnel, steam puffed now and then from her side. Behind her, reaching a
mile to the North, were ships by the dozen, coasters and great ocean
liners, loaded and waiting to discharge or empty and waiting to reload.
And to the South were miles of railroad sheds already packed to
bursting. I thought of the trains from all over the land still rushing a
nation's produce here, and of the starlit ocean roads, of ships coming
from all over the world, the men in their fiery caverns below feeding
faster the fires to quicken their speed, all bringing cargoes to this
port. More barrels, boxes, crates and bags to be piled high up on the
waterfront. For the workers had gone away from their work, and the great
white ships were still.

"What has all this to do with me?"

There came into my mind the picture of a little man I had seen that day,
a suburban commuter by his looks, frowning from a ferryboat upon a
cheering crowd of strikers. I laughed to myself as I thought of him. He
had seemed so ludicrously small.

"Yes, my friend," I thought, "you and I are a couple of two-spots here,
swallowed up in the scenery."

I thought of what Joe had said that day: "When you see the crowd, in a
strike like this, loosen up and show all it could be if it had the
chance--that sight is so big it blots you out--you sink--you melt into
the crowd."

Something like that happened to me. I had seen the multitudes "loosen
up," I had felt myself melt into the crowd. But I had not seen what they
could be nor did I see what they could do. Far to the south, high over
all the squalid tenement dwellings, rose that tower of lights I had
known so well, the airy place where Eleanore's father had dreamed and
planned his clean vigorous world. It was lighted to-night as usual, as