Thank heaven J. K. had given me up and gone to Colorado--so I was left to work in peace. I called my sketch "A Patch of Light," and sent it to a magazine. It came back with a note explaining that, while this was a fine little thing in its way, its way wasn't theirs, it was neither an article full of facts nor a story full of romance. In short, I told myself savagely, it was neither hay nor tears! Again it went forth and again back it came. Then Sue gave it to one of her writer friends who said he knew just the place for it. "No, you don't," I thought drearily. "Nobody knows--in this whole damnable desolate land." But Sue's friend sold my story--for twenty-two dollars and fifty cents! And he said that the editor wanted some more! It was curious, from my window that night, what a different harbor I saw below. Ugly still? Of course it was. But what a _rich mine_ of ugliness for the pen of a rising young author like me! CHAPTER VII Now for something bigger. I would have a whack at the place by day. No mystery now, just ugliness. I would show it up in broad daylight, bringing out every detail in the glare. I would do this by comparing it to the harbor of long ago, and the snowy white sails of my father's youth. His youth was gone. A thick-set and gray-headed old figure, he bent over his desk by my side, putting up a fierce, silent fight for his strength, and now slowly getting enough of it back to keep him at his job as a clerk in what had been his warehouse. Only once, coming suddenly into the room, I found him settled deep down in his chair, heavy, inert, his cigar gone out, staring vacantly out of the window. The sails were gone. Down there at his dock, where even in days that I could remember the tall clippers had lain for weeks, I saw now a German whaleback. She had slipped in but three days before and was already snorting to get away. She was black and she wallowed deep, and she had an enormous bulging belly into which I descended one day and explored its metallic compartments that echoed to the deafening din of some riveters at work on her sides. Though short and stout, she was nine thousand tons. Hideous, she was practical, as practical as a factory. In her the romance of the sea was buried and choked in smoke and steam, in grime, dirt, noise and a regular haste. One morning as her din increased and the black, sooty breath of her came drifting in through our window, my father rose abruptly and slammed the window down. "The damn sea hog!" he muttered.