has yet upon the hearts of men may be seen by any one who will study the
faces of the busy, imaginative cotton-brokers, who, in the thronged and
humming mornings, sell what they have never seen to a customer they will
never see.

In fact, the end I mean is just the very opposite end to that. It is the
end where the cotton that everybody sells and nobody buys _is_ seen,
piled in great white stacks, or swinging in the air from the necks of
mighty cranes, cranes that could nip up an elephant with as little ado,
and set him down on the wharf, with a box on his ugly ears for his
cowardly trumpeting. It is the end that smells of tar, the domain of the
harbourmasters, where the sailor finds a 'home,'--not too sweet, and
where the wild sea is tamed in a maze of granite squares and basins; the
end where the riggings and buildings rise side by side, and a clerk
might swing himself out upon the yards from his top-floor desk. Here is
the Custom House, and the conversation that shines is full of freightage
and dock dues; here are the shops that sell nothing but oilskins,
sextants, and parrots, and here the taverns do a mighty trade in rum.

It was in this quarter, for a brief sweet time, that Love and Beauty
made their strange home, as though a pair of halcyons should choose to
nest in the masthead of a cattleship. Love and Beauty chose this
quarter, as, alas! Love and Beauty must choose so many things--for its
cheapness. Love and Beauty were poor, and office rents in this quarter
were exceptionally low. But what should Love and Beauty do with an
office? Love was a poor poet in need of a room for his bed and his
rhymes, and Beauty was a little blue-eyed girl who loved him.

It was a shabby, forbidding place, gloomy and comfortless as a warehouse
on the banks of Styx. No one but Love and Beauty would have dared to