Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/90

 Nova Scotia schooners and full-rigged clipper ships from Calcutta and from San Francisco by way of the Horn.

Here the young reporter liked to prowl about when out on a weather story, looking at the different foreign flags and at the odd foreign cargoes unloading in strangely-wrought shipping boxes which smelled of spices, and wondering about the voyage over and about the private history of the bare-footed, underfed sailors who made it. The stevedores' derricks puffed and creaked, and far overhead the cars on the bridge rumbled on, but the big ships seemed calm and patient, and full of mystery, as if they knew too many wondrous things to be impressed by anything in America. But all this had nothing to do with the weather story, or how the fog was affecting the shipping, or how much behind their schedule the ferry-boats were running, or whether (by good fortune) there had been any collisions in the river. That was what he was down there for.

Then, too, he used to have some good times when his assignment took him over into what used to be Greenwich; along old,