was to bring
so close to their homes.

Though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing a part
of the North Sea much less known to me, I was deeply conscious of the
familiarity of my surroundings. It was a cloudy, nasty day: and the
aspects of Nature don't change, unless in the course of thousands of
years--or, perhaps, centuries. The Phoenicians, its first discoverers,
the Romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days
like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light, even on a
July afternoon, from anything they had ever known in their native
Mediterranean. For myself, a very late comer into that sea, and its
former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect
so well remembered from my days of training. The same old thing. A grey-
green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-
ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of
wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along
like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few,
very scattered, and tossing restlessly on an ever dissolving, ever re-
forming sky-line.

Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the
emptiness of the decks, favouring my reminiscent mood. It might have
been a day of five and thirty years ago, when there were on this and
every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. Yet, thanks
to the unchangeable sea I could have given myself up to the illusion of a
revised past, had it not been for the periodical transit across my gaze
of a German passenger. He was marching round and round the boat deck
with characteristic determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him
in his progress like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet.
He was bringing them home, from their school in England, for their
holiday. What could have induced such a sound Teuton to entrust his
offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and
criminal country I cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from
motives of economy. I did not speak to him. He trod the deck of that
decadent British ship with a scornful foot while his breast (and to a
large extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of
a superior destiny. Later I could observe the same truculent bearing,
touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the _