The tide hurried them down into the clattering heart of the city, a world as alien to Double Eagle as the sky is to a fish or the seabottom to a bird; a world of stone, brick, and iron, where fumes rose white and black from stacks and chimneys to tint the heavens brown. The river had taken on the color of molasses, and some of its consistency, and was spanned toward its lower end by the soaring, moiled geometry of the Brooklyn Bridge. Passing under it in both directions were vessels of every conceivable size and type: graceful fore and afters; lumpy colliers; obsolete barkentines under tow by smoke-belching tugs; down-easters with topmasts struck to allow them to clear the bridges; banana boats and ferries teeming with what looked like the populations of small towns. Each one of the ships was making a noise, and while the individual hoots, whistles, or horn blasts meant something, their combined effect was unintelligible. Mingled into the cacophony, or rather, underlying it, was a sound composed of many sounds, yet greater than the sum of its acoustic parts: a low incessant roar, like surf. It was coming from the city, and in a moment, Nathaniel realized it was the city, vast, rumbling, busy.

“Jesus, Boston seems like a hick town compared to this.”

“Natters, Boston is a hick town compared to this,” said Will, looking toward it with an anticipatory glow on his face. “Every chance I got at Yale, I was on a ferry or a train for here.”

The river pinched itself into a channel barely five hundred yards wide, between Brooklyn (recently incorporated into the city, Will declared, in the voice of a traveler’s guide) and the South Street seaport—rank upon rank of wide wharves heaped with cargo, covered with wagons, crawling with men. Ships were docked at every wharf, and the smokestacks and masts formed a gallery miles long. Will, scanning the waterfront with the binoculars, said he was looking for the boatyard where the yawl owned by Tony Burton’s father had undergone its final fitting out. They could rent dock space there overnight.

Following his gaze, Nathaniel saw a strange sight: a locomotive pulling a line of passenger cars over rooftops.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d call that a flying train,” he said.

“Those are the elevated lines of the Manhattan Railway Company,” Will said, with careful enunciation, as if speaking to a savage unfamiliar with modern innovations. “Something else New York has that Boston doesn’t.”