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116 feeling for ships and for the lake; a single word—Miwaka—a childish rhyme and story, which he might have heard repeated and have asked for a hundred times in babyhood. But these recollections were only what those of a three-years' child might have been. Not only did they refuse to connect themselves with anything else, but by the very finality of their isolation, they warned him that they—and perhaps a few more vague memories of similar sort—were all that recollection ever would give him. He caught himself together and turned his thoughts to the approaching visit to Sherrill—and his father's offices.

Observing the towering buildings to his right, he was able to identify some of the more prominent structures, familiar from photographs of the city. Constance drove swiftly a few blocks down this boulevard; then, with a sudden, "Here we are!" she shot the car to the curb and stopped. She led Alan into one of the tallest and best-looking of the buildings, where they took an elevator placarded "Express" to the fifteenth floor.

On several of the doors opening upon the wide marble hall where the elevator left them, Alan saw the names, "Corvet, Sherrill and Spearman." As they passed, without entering, one of these doors which stood propped open, and he looked in, he got his first realization of the comparatively small land accommodations which a great business conducted upon the water requires. What he saw within was only one large room, with hardly more than a dozen, certainly not a score of desks in it; nearly all the desks were closed, and there were not more than three or four people in the room, and these apparently stenographers. Doors of several smaller offices, opening upon the larger room, bore