In the “orderly” streets of a great city, a girl like Hildegarde would have been remarked, followed, probably accosted. She had had experience of that even in Valdivia, where nearly every creature knew who she was. In the vast and eager crowd on the Seattle water front she passed with little notice and wholly unmolested. Every one had business of his own. If the man who pushed against you till he nearly knocked you down was not an excited passenger rushing for the next ship, he was a company agent seeing off a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of machinery; or he was the gentleman in a smaller way of business, who was beating up trade in the neighborhood of the Last Chance Bazaar. Here and there on a tiny temporary platform, nearly swamped by the crowd, or standing insecurely on a jostled barrow, merchants whose ages ranged from eight to eighty, offered you something you’d bless them for every hour of your life at Nome. Here an improved sort of prospecting pan—you had only to carry it up to lat. 62° to fill it full of gold all day long. There was a Nome mosquito-mask, fastened like a gallows’-cap on the face of a stiff, pale figure of wax, lifted high in air, rigid, travestying death—horribly arresting. There was every kind of waterproof—hat, coat and boot; for, that summer at Nome meant nothing but rain, was the one point upon which every one agreed. By way of object lesson, “rockers” for separating Nome gold from Nome sand are being jogged to and fro upon the wharves; vendors of patent medicine are crying one another down; a different concentrated food is proclaimed at every corner, a new gold “process” every ten feet and bedlam all around you. Copper plates; pickaxes; shovels; and—“Here y’are! The last thing out! Compound-corkscrew-screw-driver-monkey-wrench, ’n’ can-opener. All y’ grub goes to Nome in cans. Y’ll starve to death right plumb in the middle o’ plenty, ’nless y’ get this yer noo compound-corkscrew-screw-driver-monkey—” The rest is drowned by the _dernier cri_ in “Nome sto-o-o-ves! Burn-oil-burn-wood-burn-coke-burn- anything-in-hell-and-never-burn-the-dinner! Nome sto-o-o-ves!” Other hawkers so hoarse you heard nothing but “Nome! Nome!” as if they had it there—a nostrum you might buy at home. Hildegarde’s mind went back to the old reconnaissance map in the dining-room. She so little she must climb upon a chair to read in her father’s fine, clear writing, the name opposite a tiny projection in the coast line. It had been a place only he seemed to know about. Now on every sign, on every lip, Nome! Nome! Nome! Overheard fragments among new-comers at the shipping offices, no more “Which boat?” but “Can you, even by paying some feller a bonus, get anything in the shape of a ticket before June?”