Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/94

Rh Press and favoured reporters. "My hospand," she informed Kay sympathetically, "is an artist too, a moosician. He has his own orghestra."

While Kay studied the theatrical papers, I took the elevated railway down-town. I wanted to stand on Brooklyn Bridge again. Since first seeing it with my father a few years before, and again on my arrival eighteen months ago, en route for Toronto, the place had held my imagination. Something sentimental lay in this third journey, for I wanted to go alone.

Halfway across, at the highest point, I stood looking down upon the great waterway between the two cities of the new world, and the feeling of a fresh chapter in life, with its inevitable comparisons, rose in me.... The sun was sinking behind the hills of New Jersey, and the crowded bay lay a sheet of golden shimmer. Huge, double-ended ferry boats, plying between the wooded shores of Staten and Manhattan Islands and Brooklyn, rushed to and fro with great snortings and hootings; little tugs dashed in every direction with vast importance; sail-boats, yachts, schooners and cat-boats dotted the water like a thousand living things; and threading majestically through them all steamed one or two impressive Atlantic liners, immense and castle-like, towering above all else, as they moved slowly out toward the open sea. The deep poetry which ever frames the most prosaic things, lending them their real significance, came over me with the wind from that open sea.

I stood watching the fading lights beyond the bay, while behind me the crowded trains, at the rate of one a minute, passed thundering across the bridge, and thousands upon thousands of tired workers thronged to their Brooklyn homes after their day in the bigger city. The great bridge swayed and throbbed as the dense masses of pedestrians climbed uphill to the centre, then swarmed in a thick black river down the nether slope. I had never seen such numbers, or such speed of nervous movement, and the eager, tense faces, usually strained, white, drawn as well, touched an unpleasant note. New York, I felt, was not to be trifled G