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And last but not least, the illusioned American from the Middle West and the South and the Northwest and the Far West, crowding in and eyeing it all so eagerly, so yearningly, like the others. Ah, the little, shabby, blue-light restaurants! The boarding houses in silent streets! The moral, hungry “homes”—how full they are of them and how hopeless! How the city sings and sings for them, and in spite of them, flaunting ever afresh its lures and beauties—a city as wonderful and fateful and ironic as life itself.

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Were I asked to choose a subject which would most gratify my own fancy I believe I would choose the docks and piers of New York. Nowhere may you find a more pleasingly encouraging picture-life going on at a leisurely gait, but going, nor one withal set in a lovelier framework. And, personally, I have always foolishly imagined that the laborers and men of affairs connected with them must be the happier for that connection. It is more than probable that that is not true, but what can be more interesting than long, heavily-laden piers jutting out into the ever-flowing waters of a river? And those tall masts adjoining, how they rock and swing! Whistler had a fancy for scenes like these; they appealed to his sense of line and background and romance. You can look at his etchings of collections of boats along the Thames at London and see how keenly he must have felt the beauty of what he saw. Networks of ropes and spars; stout, stodgy figures of half-idle laborers; delicious, comforting, homey suggestions of houses and spires behind; and then the water.