Achmed Abdullah

“ The terrible, shining American adventure of the poor foreign emigrant, greater by far than the romantic buccaneering jaunt of Spain's steel-clad knights who, centuries ago, set sail for the New World on their high-pooped frigates mounted with brass cannon—perhaps the sheer, hushed terror of it had scotched the capacity for fear in these people; and fear, the other man's fear, was as necessary for Bibi the Killer's success as the curve and glisten of his dagger. ”

“ The avenue, with its proud, self-conscious sweep picked out in a gentle curve of lights, with its immaculate, slightly snobbish flanking of shops, its gleaming brasses of automobile and motor-bus, its human throng, leisurely and restless in the same breath, its well-fleshed, muscular, imperturbable police that stemmed the tide with a gesture of white-gloved hands, he dismissed at once as dangerous, and therefore impracticable. ”

“ The sudden, keen, pitiless lifting out of the drab, sticky rut of the gray centuries because a ship-agent talks plausibly or because a ship-poster glares in hopeful green and enthusiastic chrome-yellow, and, too, because of the hope of more money, more food, and—perhaps—a dream of liberty. Then the going away from home and country; the leaving of the little inland village where the soul's roots are, where they have always lived, with wife and children and no earthly possessions except the regulation forty dollars and a bundle of threadbare clothes ”