hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up.  Others, had got places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes of long-stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of the men, with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins.  In the midst of the turmoil children struggled against people’s feet and knees, and bewildered mothers flew at the ship’s officers and battered them with questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifled about in their thick uniforms.

Sailors, slung over the ship’s side on swinging seats, were placidly smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly set with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends on shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noises midway.  Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were probably not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin passengers, or even for their health; on the wharf below March saw the face of one young girl twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not seen it.  He turned from it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was laughing at his shoulder.  He said that he had to come down with a good-by letter from his sister, which he made an excuse for following them; but he had always meant to see them off, he owned.  The letter had just come with a special delivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sent another good-by letter with some flowers on board.  Mrs. March scolded at them both, but with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress of parting which he thought he had put from him, March went on taking note, as with alien senses, of the scene before him, while they all talked on together, and repeated the nothings they had said already.

A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia.  The mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the roofs, and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and carts, and discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and were lost in the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents, becoming clogged and arrested from time to time, and then beginning to move again.

The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries leading, fore and aft, into the ship.  Bareheaded, blue-jacketed, brass-buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with their hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran before them into the different depths and heights where they hid these burdens, and then ran back for more.  Some of the passengers followed them and made sure that their things were put in the right places; most of them remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and out of the doors of the promenades.