by far the
most valuable part of it all."

"It's just what I've been trying to find out for myself," I replied.

"Really? Will you tell me?"

I told him how on docks, on tugs and barges, in barrooms and in
tenements, I was having talks with various types of men who had been
strikers, how I was finding some dull and hopeless, others bitter, but
more who simply felt that they had bungled this first attempt and were
already looking forward to more and greater struggles. The socialists
among them were already hard at work, urging them to carry their strike
on into the political field, vote together in one solid mass and build
up a government all their own. Through this ceaseless ferment I had gone
in search of significant characters, incidents, new points of view. I
was writing brief sketches of it all.

"How did you feel about all this," the Englishman asked, "before you
were drawn into the strike?" And turning from me to Eleanore, "And you?"
he added.

Gradually he got the stories of our lives. I told how all my life I had
been raising up gods to worship, and how the harbor had flowed silently
in beneath, undermining each one and bringing it down.

"It seems to have such a habit of changing," I ended, "that it won't let
a fellow stop."

"Lucky people," he answered, smiling, "to have found that out so
soon--to have had all this modern life condensed so cozily into your
harbor before your eyes--and to have discovered, while you are still
young, that life is growth and growth is change. I believe the age we
live in is changing so much faster than any age before it, that a man if
he's to be vital at all must give up the idea of any fixed creed--in his
office, his church or his home--that if he does not, he will only wear
himself out butting his indignant head against what is stronger and
probably better than he. But if he does, if he holds himself open to
change and knows that change is his very life, then he can get a
serenity which is as much better than that of the monk as living is
better than dying."

We talked of books being written in England and France, in Germany and
Russia, all dealing with deep changes in the views and beliefs and
desires of men.

"Any man," he said, "who thinks that modern Europe will go smoothly,
quietly on, needs a dose of your harbor to open his eyes."

He turned to me with a sudden thought.

"Why don't you write a book," he asked, "about this harbor you have
known!"

Eleanore