But the watch has not stopped. Insecure in his own mind he lifts it to his ear. It is ticking briskly. The man is perplexed. He goes to the window and peeps out from it. A great office building across the way is gaily alight--a strange performance for before dawn of a September morning. He looks down into the street. Two long files of brightly lighted cars are passing through the street, one up, the other down. The glistening pavements are peopled, the stores are brightly lighted--the man glances at his watch once again. Eight minutes of nine, it tells him this time. He smiles as he gazes down into that busy street. "This is Pittsburgh," he says. Later that day that same man stands in another window--of a tall skyscraper this time--and again gazes down. Suspended there below him is a seeming chaos. There are smoke and fog and dirt there, through these--showing ever and ever so faintly--tall, artificial cliffs, punctured with row upon row of windows, brightly lighted at midday. From the narrow gorges between these cliffs come the rustle and the rattle of much traffic. It comes to the man in waves of indefinite sound. He lifts his gaze and sees beyond these artificial cliffs, mountains--real mountains--towering, with houses upon their crests, and steep, inclined railroads climbing their precipitous sides. In these houses, also, there are lights burning at midday. Below them are great stacks--row upon row upon row of them, like coarse-toothed combs turned upside down--and the black smoke that pours up from them is pierced now and then and again by bright tongues of flame--the radiance of furnaces that glow throughout the night and day. "We're mud and dirt up to our knees--and money all the rest of the way," says the owner of that office. He is a native of the city. He comes to the window and points to one of the rivers--a yellow-brown mirrored surface, scarcely glistening under leaden clouds but bearing long tows by the dozen--coal barges, convoyed by dirty stern-wheeled steamboats. "There is one of the busiest harbors in the world," says the Pittsburgh man. "A harbor which in tonnage is not so far back of your own blessed New York." The New Yorker, for this man is a New Yorker, laughs at the very idea of calling that sluggish narrow river a harbor. They have a real harbor in his town and real rivers lead into it. This does not even seem a real river. It reminds him quite definitely of Newtown creek--that slimy, busy waterway along which trains used to pass in the days when the Thirty-fourth street ferry was the gateway to Long Island.