Where had he been a year ago, this imp who had fervently crossed himself? In Naples, Rome or Venice, or poking his toes into the dust of a street in some dull little town in the hills? What great condor of to-day had picked him up and dropped him here? How did it look to him? What did he feel? I came back to the dump night after night, and writing blindly in the dark I tried to jot down what he saw--gigantic shapes and shadows, some motionless, some rushing by with their dim spectral little lights, and over all the great arch of the Bridge rearing over half the sky. The lantern in the cave behind threw a patch of light on the water below, and across that patch from under the pier where the water was slapping, slapping, there came an endless bobbing procession--a whisky bottle, a broken toy horse, a bit of a letter, a pink satin slipper, a dirty white glove--things tossed out of people's lives. On and on they came. And I knew there were miles of black water like this all covered with tiny processions like this moving slowly out with the ebb tide, out from the turbulent city toward the silent ocean. One night the watchman on the dump showed me a heavy paper bag with what would have been a baby inside. Where had it come from? He didn't know. Tossed out of some woman's life, in a day it would be far out on the ocean, bobbing, bobbing with the rest. Water from here to Naples, water from here to heathen lands. Just here a patch of light from a lantern. That imp from Italy looking down--into something immense and dark and unknown. He was having a spree with the harbor, as I had had when as small as he. I saw him watch the older boys and listen thrilled to their wonderful talk--as once I, too, had been thrilled by Sam. I watched him over a game of dice, quarreling, scowling, grabbing at pennies, slapped by some one, whimpering, then eagerly getting back to the game. It was "craps," I had played it with Sam and the gang. One night he dropped a cigarette still lighted into the rags and was given a blow by his boss that knocked him into a corner. But presently he crawled cautiously forth, and again with both hands hugging his knees he sat and watched the harbor. What a big spree for a little boy. I put my own childhood into this imp, into him my first feelings toward this place. And so I came again to my roots. How the memories rose up now--the fascinations and terrors that I, too, had felt before something immense and dark and unknown.