grew sharp and hard. Windows flashed flame-coloured in their grey
sides, the gold and bronze tops of towers began to gleam where
the sunlight struggled through. The transport was sliding down
toward the point, and to the left the eye caught the silver
cobweb of bridges, seen confusingly against each other.

"There she is!" "Hello, old girl!" "Good-bye, sweetheart!"

The swarm surged to starboard. They shouted and gesticulated to
the image they were all looking for,--so much nearer than they
had expected to see her, clad in green folds, with the mist
streaming up like smoke behind. For nearly every one of those
twenty-five hundred boys, as for Claude, it was their first
glimpse of the Bartholdi statue. Though she was such a definite
image in their minds, they had not imagined her in her setting of
sea and sky, with the shipping of the world coming and going at
her feet, and the moving cloud masses behind her. Post-card
pictures had given them no idea of the energy of her large
gesture, or how her heaviness becomes light among the vapourish
elements. "France gave her to us," they kept saying, as they
saluted her. Before Claude had got over his first thrill, the
Kansas band in the bow began playing "Over There." Two thousand
voices took it up, booming out over the water the gay,
indomitable resolution of that jaunty air.

A Staten Island ferry-boat passed close under the bow of the
transport. The passengers were office-going people, on their way
to work, and when they looked up and saw these hundreds of faces,
all young, all bronzed and grinning, they began to shout and wave
their handkerchiefs. One of the passengers was an old clergyman,
a famous speaker in his day, now retired, who went over to the
City every morning to write editorials for a church paper. He
closed the book he was reading, stood by the rail, and taking off
his hat began solemnly to quote from a poet who in his time was
still popular. "Sail on," he quavered,

"Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State,
Humanity, with all its fears,
With all its hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate."

As the troop ship glided down the sea lane, the old man still
watched it from the turtle-back. That howling swarm of brown arms
and hats and faces looked like nothing, but a crowd of American
boys going to a football game somewhere. But the scene was
ageless; youths were sailing away to die for an idea, a
sentiment, for the mere sound of a phr