At last we were coming to the end--to that last figure in dollars and cents. I caught his suspense and we talked little now. I knew the price at which he was selling, and toward that figure I watched the debts creep slowly up. I saw them creep over, and knew that we had not a dollar left to live on. And still the debts kept mounting. How small they were, these last ones, a coil of rope, two kegs of paint--the irony of it compared to the bigness of his life. Still these little figures climbed. At last he handed me his balance. He was in debt four thousand, one hundred and forty-six dollars and seventeen cents. He had risen from his old office chair: "Well, son, I guess that ends our work." "Yes, sir." He went out of the office. I sat there dully for some time. Then I remember there came a harsh scream from a freight engine close outside. And I looked out of the window. The harbor of big companies, uglier than I had ever seen it, no longer dotted with white sails, but clouded with the smoke and soot of an age of steam, and iron, lay sprawled out there like a thing alive. Always changing, always growing, it had crushed the life out of my father and mother, and now it was ready for Sue and me. "I've got to stay here and make money." Good-by to the Beautiful City of Grays. A clock in an outer room struck five. In Paris it was ten o'clock, and those friends of mine from all countries were crowding into "The Dirty Spoon." I could see them sauntering one by one on that summer's night down the gay old Boulevard Saint Michel and dropping into their seats at the table in the corner. "How am I to make money? By writing?" I thought of De Maupassant and the rest, and the two years I had spent in trying to make vivid and real the life I had seen. In these last anxious weeks I had sent some of my Paris sketches to magazine offices in New York. They had all been returned with printed slips of rejection, except in one case where the editor wrote, "This is a good piece of writing, but the subject is too remote. Why not try something nearer home?" "All right," I thought, "what's near me here? Let's see. There's a cloud of yellow smoke I can do, with a brand-new tug below it dragging a string of good big barges. What are they loaded with? Standard Oil. Wait till they get closer and I can even describe the smell! No," I concluded savagely. "Let's keep my writing clean out of this hole and get the money some other way!" Then suddenly I forgot myself and thought of my stern brave old dad. What under the sun was he going to do? That week he mortgaged our house on the Heights for five thousand dollars. With this he paid off all his debts and put the balance in the bank. Then from the big dock company he got a job in his own warehouse at a hundred dollars a month. "Kind of 'em," he said gruffly. He was sixty-five years old. They were even kind enough to add to that a job for me. I sat at the desk next to his and I was paid ten dollars a week.