“The Roland was overdue more than three days,” Willy explained.  “We were already beginning to be alarmed.  Finally the passenger list from Bremen was published, and soon after your name, too, Doctor von Kammacher, appeared in the newspapers, your father in the meantime having cabled that you left Paris to catch the Roland at Southampton.  I never lost faith that nothing but the wretched weather was delaying you, and I inquired at the steamship company’s office every day.  It was there that I learned of the sinking of the Roland and the arrival of the Hamburg with the first rescued passengers on board, with you among them.”  Noticing Ingigerd’s sudden pallor, Willy added vivaciously, with apparent conviction, “A lot of others must surely have been rescued.”

The amount of traffic, as indicated by an endless number of ferry-boats, tugs, and steamers of every sort, was immense.  The ferry-boats, black with people, resembled floating towers of Babel, above which rose an iron something like a pump-handle, seesawing up and down with the invisible pistons.

When the boat lay fast in the slip, there was a great thundering as the vehicles all began to move at the same time to the accompaniment of a tramping mass of humanity.

“This city,” Frederick thought, “is obsessed by a craze for money making.”  The idea was suggested to him chiefly by the advertisements staring on all sides, those shrill, over-spiced, over-charged asseverations, compared with which the same thing in Europe was delicate as a violet, innocent as a newborn babe.  Wherever he turned his eyes, gigantic placards glared at him, gigantic letters, gigantic, garishly coloured pictures, gigantic fingers and hands pointing to something.  Twenty negroes carrying bill-boards, a carriage drawn by twelve horses harnessed like circus horses passed by.  It was a shrieking, greedy war of competition, waged with every conceivable means, a wild, shameless orgy of acquisitiveness, but for that very reason not lacking in a certain greatness.  There was no hypocrisy about it.  It was honest in its outspokenness.

The cab stopped at a telegraph office, and Frederick cabled to his father, “I am safe, sound, and well;” Ingigerd to her mother in Paris, “I am safe.  Papa’s fate uncertain.”  While Ingigerd was writing, Frederick took the chance to tell Willy Snyders that she had probably lost her father in the wreck.

Several times newsboys thrust a paper under Frederick’s nose, calling out the great sensation, “All about the sinking of the Roland!  All about the sinking of the Roland!” In large, catching headlines he read:  “The Roland leaves Bremen.  Slight accident compels her to return. Roland starts on trip again.  Constant storms.  Dead man on board.  Nine hundred drowned.  Heroic conduct of a servant-girl.  Doctor Frederick von Kammacher performs miracles of bravery.”  Frederick started, reflected, but could not recall anything of the sort.  “Child dies in life-boat.  Captain Butor of the Hamburg sights castaways.  Report of survivors.  Arthur Stoss, champion armless marksman, helped into life-boat by faithful valet,” and so on.  It was an invaluable supply of fresh, sensational, gratuitously obtained material, to be served for a week in generous portions to readers in both the old and the new worlds.