Excerpt from Little Mother America America! She repeated to herself. The sylla bles were pleasant. America. It came to her like an old friend. She knew it. She had heard it and spoken it before and it was good to hear and to say. Yet she did not know what it signified. America, she repeated over and over as though the mere saying of it brought her solace. She was struggling to unravel a hopeless tangle. How did she happen to be there? Had she been ill? Where was she being swept by the resistless rush of the ship? Out of chaos she felt the cruel stab of loneliness and distorted visions of fighting and slaughter passed like moving pictures through her brain. Had she seen these things or were they the hideous dreams of a long, dark night? She could not tell, for she was possessed of a conviction of nu reality. It would not have surprised her if every thing about her had suddenly dissolved into thin air. If she were risen from the dead, the hereafter could be no less an immaterial phantom than the present, and for all she knew the shimmering, pastel City, of lofty spires and glittering lights that spilled their trembling, liquid gold lavishly upon the sea, might be Paradise. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.