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I stood on the bow to have my first look at New York.

One’s inner sense does not perceive the thing in the moment of experience, but films it, to be afterward developed in fluid recollection. I see it now in memory as I only felt it then.

A wide mile of opal water, pulsatile, thrilling to itself in a languorous ancient way. And so indifferent! Indifference was its immemorial character. I watched the things that walked upon it—four-eyed, double-ended ferryboats with no fore or aft, like those monsters of the myth that never turned around; tugs like mighty Percherons, dragging sledges in a string; a loitering hyena, marked dynamite, much to be avoided; behemoths of the deep, helpless in this thoroughfare, led by hawsers from the nose; sore-footed scows with one pole rigs, and dressy, high-heeled pleasure craft. The river was as unregardful of all these tooting, hooting, hissing improvisations as of the natural fish, the creaking gulls, or those swift and ceaseless patterns woven of the light which seem to play upon its surface and are not really there.