As happens on occasion the weather changed with dramatic suddenness in the last week in November. One might almost imagine that our august emperor of the seasons, the Indian Summer, protracting his reign against all the wishes of the gods, stirring up the implacable bitterness and hatred of winter, had gone down suddenly in ruin and death. I remember well the evening of the change. I had spent a tiring day in New York, working gradually up Broadway as far as Twenty-third Street. Seen through the windows of the Jersey City ferryboat, the prow-like configuration of lower Manhattan seemed to be plunging stubbornly against the gale of sleet that was tearing up from the Narrows. The hoarse blast of the ferry-whistle was swept out of hearing, the panes resounded with millions of impacts as the sleet, like thin iron rods, drove against them. An ignoble impulse led me to join the scurrying stampede of commuters towards the warmth and shelter of the waiting-room. There is something personally hostile in a blizzard. In the earthquake at San Francisco there was a giant playfulness in the power that shook the brick front from our frame-house and revealed our intimate privacies to a heedless mob. There was a feeling there, even at the worst, when the slow shuddering rise of the earth changed to a swift and soul-shattering subsidence, a feeling that one was yet in the hands of God. But in a blizzard one apprehends an anger puny and personal. There is no sublimity in defying it; one runs to the waiting-room. And once there, nodding to Confield, who sat in a corner nursing his cosmopolitan bag, pressing through the little crowd about the news-stand, I found myself urging my body past a man wearing a Derby hat and smoking a corn-cob pipe. I had a momentary sense of gratification that even a seasoned seafarer like Mr. Carville should feel no shame in taking shelter from the inclement weather.
"Good evening, sir," he said imperturbably. "Homeward bound?"
"Sure," I said, putting down a cent and taking up the Manhattan Mail, an evening journal of modest headlines. "I suppose you are coming out, too?"
"Yes," he said, as we turned away, "I've come up from the ship. We only got in this morning."
"You are late," I agreed. "Mrs. Carville said you might be in on Saturday, and here it is Wednesday."
He gave me a quick glance.
"Oh! Did she tell you? Yes, we had several bad days after passing Fastnet. The Western ocean is bad all over just now."
"I suppose you were sorry to leave the Mediterranean."
"It was Bremerhaven this time," he replied, striking a match. "Near Hamburg, you know. They change us about now and again."
"What is your cargo?" I asked.