Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PROFITS AFTER a day of revery watching the river and the tugs that pass, soughing and whistling, to one another, sailing up the street of the river, proudly in front of the cliff of the sky-scrapers and under the lofty bridges, with a loaded barge on either arm ? after a day of revery and watching, do I know any secret? The men who own the chugging tugs and unresisting barges sit in the sky-scrapers and count their profits. They would laugh at my thoughts, if they knew them; and I could never find a way to tell them what there is in a foaming bow or a trail of smoke, to make me waste a day in profitless gazing at the tugs and barges that do their bidding. There is no mystery, they would say, about their errands ? just freight cars to be transferred and bales to be lightered. And it is for fear of lawsuits and collisions that they have put emerald and ruby lamps on their creeping boats, now the night has come, and not at all to festoon my thoughts with chaplets of fire and give me hints of the birth and death of stars. TRADE HER derricks thrust their yellow booms through the lilac air, like the naked sticks of a shuffled fan, and her wireless sags between slanting masts. Rusty teeth of winches chatter and grate, as bale after bale, jerked up on a tawny rope dodders an instant over the river to flash from a wailing block into the thudding grumble of the hold. Like a huge bassoon her loose-lipped whistle flibbers. I see the puffed flurry of the steam grip her smoke-stack like a hand and drift out into lingering torn undulations. She is peeling the rooted wharf away from her side and her life-boats seem to slide along its pebbled roof. Tugs waddle around her whipping t...
Synopsis
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.