It was a pearl-grey morning, going over, with a mist that was almost a fog hanging upon the water and making unearthly and like a mirage the strange sky-line before them. There were not so many huge, tall buildings as there would be in after years, but they were beginning. The mist drifted, opening and closing, and to the mist was added the fairy garlands and pennants of white steam. Out of the luminous haze grew white ferryboats and low barges, and here passed an opalescent shape like a vast moth wing. "A sailboat," said Hagar under her breath. The air was chill and clinging. Sylvie and Captain Powhatan Maine preferred to sit and talk within the cabin, but Hagar remained outside. She stood with her hands lightly touching the rail, her eyes wide. Another sailboat slipped past. She turned and looked along the widening water, oceanward, and in a rift of the grey pearl clouds she seemed to see, at a great distance, a looming woman shape. A salt odour filled her nostrils. "Oh, the sea! I smell the sea!" The ferryboat glided into its slip, the bell rang, the chains rattled; out resonantly, from the lower deck, passed the great dray horses and heavy wagons; the passengers disembarked; a crowd hurried, in column, toward the Elevated. Half-bewildered, Hagar found herself mounting long flights of steps, passing through a gateway, entering a train, which at once, with a shriek, began to run upon a level with second-story windows. She saw dingy red-brick factory and tenement buildings close, close to her face; fire-escapes and staring windows with squalid or horribly tawdry rooms beyond; on the window-sills spindling, starved plants in ancient, battered tin cans, children's faces, women leaning out, children, children, children--"We have to go quite far uptown," said Captain Maine. "Well, and what do you girls want to see first?" He was a short, stout, gallant gentleman with a fierce grey mustache. Sylvie talked for both. Hagar nodded her head or commanded a smile when manners seemed to indicate it, but her mind was dealing with a nightmare. "Was this--was this New York?" Once she turned her head toward their escort, but something told her that if, indeed, she asked the absurd question, he would say, "Why, yes! Don't you like it?"