Gone, too, were the American sailors. All races of men on the earth but ours seemed gathered around this hog of the sea. From barges filled with her cargo, the stuff was being heaved up on the dock by a lot of Irish bargemen. Italian dockers rolled it across to this German ship, and on deck a Jap under-officer was bossing a Coolie crew. These Coolies were dwarfs with big white teeth and stooping, round little shoulders. They had strange, nervous faces, long and narrow with high cheek bones and no foreheads at all to speak of. Their black eyes gleamed. Back and forth they scurried to the sound of that guttural Japanese voice. "The cheapest sea labor there is," growled Dad. "Good-by to Yankee sailors." The Old East with its riches was no longer here. For what were these Coolies doing? Handling silks and spices? Oh, no. They were hoisting and letting down into the hold an automobile from Dayton, Ohio, bound for New South Wales. Gone were the figs and almonds, the indigo, ivory, tortoise shells. Into the brand-new ledgers over which my father worked, he was entering such items as barbed wire, boilers, car wheels and gas engines, baby carriages, kegs of paint. I reveled in the commonplace stuff, contrasting it vividly in my mind with the starlit ocean roads it would travel, the picturesque places it would help spoil. I filled in the scene with all its details, the more accurate, glaring and real the better--the brand-new towering skyline risen of late on Manhattan, the new steel bridge, an ugly one this, and all the modern steam craft, tugs, river boats, Sound steamers, each one of them panting and spewing up smoke. I sat there like a stenographer and took down the harbor's dictation, noting the rasping tones of its voice, recording eagerly all its smells. And all this and more that I gathered, I focussed on the sea hog. And then toward the end of a winter's day we looked out of our window and saw her "sail." She sailed in a nervous, worrying haste to the grunts and shrieks of a lot of steam winches. Up rattled her anchor, out she waddled, tugs puffing their smoke and steam in her face. She didn't depart. Who ever heard of a hog departing? She just went. There were no songs, no last good-byes--except from a man in his shirt sleeves who called from the deck to a man on the pier, "So long, Mac, see you next Spring," and then went into the factory. When the work of the day was over, I went down into the dock shed. My father's old place was at peace for a time, the desecration done with. She was empty, dark and silent. In her long, inward-sloping walls the eight wide sliding doors were closed. Only through the dusty skylights here and there fell great masses of soft light. Big bunches of canvas hung from above, ropes dangled out of the shadows. And there were huge rhythmic creakings that made you feel the ocean still here, an old ocean under an old, old dock. The place grew creepy with its past.