lost themselves in
louder noises midway. Some of the women in the steerage were crying;
they were probably not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin
passengers, or even for their health; on the wharf below March saw the
face of one young girl twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not
seen it. He turned from it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who
was laughing at his shoulder. He said that he had to come down with a
good-by letter from his sister, which he made an excuse for following
them; but he had always meant to see them off, he owned. The letter had
just come with a special delivery stamp, and it warned them that she
had sent another good-by letter with some flowers on board. Mrs. March
scolded at them both, but with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed
stress of parting which he thought he had put from him, March went on
taking note, as with alien senses, of the scene before him, while they
all talked on together, and repeated the nothings they had said already.

A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where
some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically
with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia. The
mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the
roofs, and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and
carts, and discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and
were lost in the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents,
becoming clogged and arrested from time to time, and then beginning to
move again.

The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries
leading, fore and aft, into the ship. Bareheaded, blue-jacketed,
brass-buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with
their hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran
before them into the different depths and heights where they hid these
burdens, and then ran back for more. Some of the passengers followed
them and made sure that their things were put in the right places; most
of them remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in
and out of the doors of the promenades.

The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf,
with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of the
ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harsh
hissings and rattlings and gurglings. There was no apparent reason why
it sho