Observe the _Nieuw Amsterdam_ as she lies, very solid and spick, a
few piers above. Her funnel is gay with bright green stripes; her
glazed promenade deck is white and immaculate. But, is there not
just a faint suggestion of smugness in her mien? She seems thanking
the good old Dutch Deity of cleanliness and respectability that she
herself is not like this poor trolloping giantess, degraded from the
embrace of ocean and the unblemished circle of the sea.

That section of Hoboken waterfront, along toward the green
promontory crowned by Stevens Institute, still has a war-time
flavour. The old Hamburg-American line piers are used by the Army
Transport Service, and in the sunshine a number of soldiers, off
duty, were happily drowsing on a row of two-tiered beds set outdoors
in the April pleasantness. There was a racket of bugles, and a squad
seemed to be drilling in the courtyard. Endymion and the Secretary,
after sitting on a pier-end watching some barges, and airing their
nautical views in a way they would never have done had any pukka
seafaring men been along, were stricken with the very crisis of
spring fever and lassitude. They considered the possibility of
hiring one of the soldiers' two-tiered beds for the afternoon.
Perhaps it is the first two syllables of Hoboken's name that make it
so desperately debilitating to the wayfarer in an April noonshine.
Perhaps it was a kind of old nostalgia, for the Secretary remembered
that sailormen's street as it had been some years ago, when he had
been along there in search of schooners of another sort.

But anatomizing their anguish, these creatures finally decided that
it might not be spring fever, but merely hunger. They saw the statue
of the late Mr. Sloan of the Lackawanna Railroad--Sam Sloan, the
bronze calls him, with friendly familiarity. The aspiring forelock
of that statue, and the upraised finger of Samuel Sullivan Cox ("The
Letter Carriers' Friend") in Astor Place, the club considers two of
the most striking things in New York statuary. Mr. Pappanicholas,
who has a candy shop in the high-spirited building called Duke's
House, near the ferry terminal, must be (Endymion thought) some
relative of Santa Claus. Perhaps he _is_ Santa Claus, and the club
pondered on the quite new idea that Santa Claus has lived in Hoboken
all these years and no one had guessed it. The club asked a friendly
policeman if there were a second-hand bookstore anywhere near. "Not
that I know of,"