e material first in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a
poem; but he found himself unable to grasp the notion of its essential
relation to the choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as
entrees of the restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he
knew that he had begun to dream, and that he must get up. He was just
going to get up, when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air,
penetrating from the new day outside. He looked at his watch and found
it was quarter past six; he glanced round the state-room and saw that
he had passed the night alone in it. Then he splashed himself hastily at
the basin next his berth, and jumped into his clothes, and went on deck,
anxious to lose no feature or emotion of the ship's departure.

When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coat
he had put on at the instigation of the early morning air. His room-mate
was still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage,
and Burnamy tried to infer him from it. He perceived a social quality
in his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella,
and sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own
equipment. The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of
polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them
here and there. They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and
Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it
had not been for the initials U. S. A. which followed the name of E. B.
Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of
the lower berth.

The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the
passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the
steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and
he now imagined a trespass on his property. But he reassured himself by
a glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship's passage down
the stream and through the Narrows. After breakfast he came to his room
again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better
in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he
professed a much more general purpose. He blamed himself for not having
got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the
passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet;
but there was a pair of enamelled leather boots in his ba