ee days," Willy explained. "We
were already beginning to be alarmed. Finally the passenger list from
Bremen was published, and soon after your name, too, Doctor von
Kammacher, appeared in the newspapers, your father in the meantime having
cabled that you left Paris to catch the _Roland_ at Southampton. I never
lost faith that nothing but the wretched weather was delaying you, and I
inquired at the steamship company's office every day. It was there that I
learned of the sinking of the _Roland_ and the arrival of the _Hamburg_
with the first rescued passengers on board, with you among them."
Noticing Ingigerd's sudden pallor, Willy added vivaciously, with apparent
conviction, "A lot of others must surely have been rescued."

The amount of traffic, as indicated by an endless number of ferry-boats,
tugs, and steamers of every sort, was immense. The ferry-boats, black
with people, resembled floating towers of Babel, above which rose an
iron something like a pump-handle, seesawing up and down with the
invisible pistons.

When the boat lay fast in the slip, there was a great thundering as the
vehicles all began to move at the same time to the accompaniment of a
tramping mass of humanity.

"This city," Frederick thought, "is obsessed by a craze for money
making." The idea was suggested to him chiefly by the advertisements
staring on all sides, those shrill, over-spiced, over-charged
asseverations, compared with which the same thing in Europe was delicate
as a violet, innocent as a newborn babe. Wherever he turned his eyes,
gigantic placards glared at him, gigantic letters, gigantic, garishly
coloured pictures, gigantic fingers and hands pointing to something.
Twenty negroes carrying bill-boards, a carriage drawn by twelve horses
harnessed like circus horses passed by. It was a shrieking, greedy war of
competition, waged with every conceivable means, a wild, shameless orgy
of acquisitiveness, but for that very reason not lacking in a certain
greatness. There was no hypocrisy about it. It was honest in its
outspokenness.

The cab stopped at a telegraph office, and Frederick cabled to his
father, "I am safe, sound, and well;" Ingigerd to her mother in Paris,
"I am safe. Papa's fate uncertain." While Ingigerd was writing, Frederick
took the chance to tell Willy Snyders that she had probably lost her
father in the wreck.

Several times newsboys thrust a paper under Frederick's nose, calling out
the great sensation, "All about