Louder rose the singing. Half the crew was crowded close around a little red-faced cockney. He was the modern "chanty man." With sweat pouring down his cheeks and the muscles of his neck drawn taut, he was jerking out verse after verse about women. He sang to an old "chanty" tune, one that I remembered well. But he was not singing out under the stars, he was screaming at steel walls down here in the bottom of the ship. And although he kept speeding up his song, the crowd were too drunk to wait for the chorus; their voices kept tumbling in over his, and soon it was only a frenzy of sound, a roar with yells rising out of it. The singers kept pounding each other's backs or waving bottles over their heads. Two bottles smashed together and brought a still higher burst of glee. "I'm tired!" Joe shouted. "Let's get out!" I caught a glimpse of his strained frowning face. Again it came over me in a flash, the years he had spent in holes like this, in this hideous rotten world of his, while I had lived joyously in mine. And as though he had read the thought in my disturbed and troubled eyes, "Let's go up where _you_ belong," he said. I followed him up and away from his friends. As we climbed ladder after ladder, fainter and fainter on our ears rose that yelling from below. Suddenly we came out on deck and slammed an iron door behind us. And I was where _I_ belonged. I was in dazzling sunshine and keen, frosty autumn air. I was among gay throngs of people. Dainty women brushed me by. I felt the softness of their furs, I breathed the fragrant scent of them and of the flowers that they wore, I saw their trim, fresh, immaculate clothes. I heard the joyous tumult of their talking and their laughing to the regular crash of the band--all the life of the ship I had known so well. And I walked through it all as though in a dream. On the dock I watched it spell-bound--until with handkerchiefs waving and voices calling down good-byes, that throng of happy travellers moved slowly out into midstream. And I knew that deep below all this, down in the bottom of the ship, the stokers were still singing. Caliban in the Coal Mines (_From "Challenge"_) BY LOUIS UNTERMEYER (American poet, born 1885) God, we don't like to complain-- We know that the mine is no lark-- But--there's the pools from the rain; But--there's the cold and the dark. God, You don't know what it is-- You, in Your well-lighted sky, Watching the meteors whizz; Warm, with the sun always by. God, if You had but the moon Stuck in Your cap for a lamp, Even You'd tire of it soon, Down in the dark and the damp. Nothing but blackness above, And nothing that moves but the cars-- God, if You wish for our love, Fling us a handful of stars! The Fertilizer Man (_From "The Jungle"_) BY UPTON SINCLAIR (A novel portraying the lives of the workers in the Chicago stockyards; published in 1906)