And on through the rooms Stickney shouldered: all in the air here an odour of the sea, and of them that go down to it in ships; pilot, captain, supercargo, purser; abstracts from logs, copies of manifests and clearances, marks and numbers of merchandise, with quantities, shippers, consignees; here peaked caps, and the jaw that chewed once, and paused long, and, lo, it moved anew; Black Books, massive volumes enshrining ancient wrecks; vast newspaper-files in every tongue; records of changes in lightships, lights, buoys, and beacons, from Shanghai to Cape Horn; reports, charts, atlases, globes; the progress of the rebellion in Shantung, and the earthquake last night in Quito; directories, and high-curved reference-books, and storm-maps; every minute the arrival of cipher cablegrams, breathless with the day's Amsterdam exchange on London, or with the quantities of tea _in transitu_ via Suez or Pacific Railway; and the drift of ocean-currents, and the latest position of the _Jane Richardson_, derelict, and the arrival of the _Ladybird_ at Bahia; and the probabilities of wind-circulation, atmospheric moisture, aberrations of audibility in fog; and in the middle of it the pulse of the sun, the thundering engines and shooting shuttles of this Loom; a tiptop briskness and bustle of action; a scramble of wits; a _mêlée_ to the death; mixed with pea-jackets, and aromas of chewed pigtail, and a rolling in the gait. Into this roar of life that word _Kaiser_ stole: and it grew to a chorus. Charles P. Stickney, butting upon a tearing clerk who was holding aloft a bulletin of icebergs and derelicts, tried to stop him: upon which the clerk, who would not be stopped, cried with a back-looking face of passionate haste: “London message just received--_no intelligence of Kaiser_--” But he had hardly disappeared, when another man from an inner room rushed, waving something: the Navesink Highlands lookout had wired the _Kaiser_ in sight! And while the Exchange rang with cheers, Stickney, a colour now in his sere cheeks, went boring his way outward. The lookout had said it--those blue eyes that never failed there on his watch-tower, he knowing the ships that sail the sea as the Cyclops his sheep, in his heart so knowing them all, that as that sea-glass detected a speck on the horizon, those sea-wise nostrils sniffed its name: for between the _Mary Jane_ and the _Mary Anne_, both off-shore schooners, is all the world of difference: if you would not see it, _he_ knows. And he had wired the _Kaiser!_--so expectant his outlook: and that day wept like a ruined man. Swift upon his first wire a second flashed: and one of those craped days of the tragedies of commerce followed, the boding, the loss, flashed everywhere, pervading Europe and America.