of birds rising from the field.

The Marches tried to make out their son's face; they believed that they
did; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother said
that she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though she
was glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural that
he should not, when everybody else was saying good-by.

On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased
to have the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like an
impressionistic study. As the ship swung free of the shed and got into
the stream, the shore lost reality. Up to a certain moment, all was
still New York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and
monstrous shows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself
at sea and on the way to Europe.

The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the
deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in
the best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily
verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores,
while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them,
and as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him
breathless. A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad,
came flying down the promenade from the steerage. "Capitan! Capitan!
There is a woman!" he shouted in nondescript English. "She must go hout!
She must go hout!" Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship's command
and seemed to penetrate to the ship's heart; she stopped, as if with
a sort of majestic relenting. A tug panted to her side, and lifted a
ladder to it; the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her
arms, sprawled safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the
steamer moved seaward again.

"What is it? Oh, what is it?" his wife demanded of March's share of
their common ignorance. A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested
by the tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left
three little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid
some friends on board good-by.

He passed on, and Mrs. March said, "What a charming face he had!" even
before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought
sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have
escaped danger. She would not hear any excuse for her. "Her children
oughtn't to have been out of