Landwehr_
corps, that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian army in
Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have
been, most probably was, an officer of the _Landwehr_; and perhaps those
two fine active boys are orphans by now. Thus things acquire
significance by the lapse of time. A citizen, a father, a warrior, a
mote in the dust-cloud of six million fighting particles, an unconsidered
trifle for the jaws of war, his humanity was not consciously impressed on
my mind at the time. Mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels
round the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green
overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting
cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey North Sea. He was but a shadowy intrusion
and a disregarded one, for, far away there to the West, in the direction
of the Dogger Bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and
sometimes find their graves, I could behold an experience of my own in
the winter of '81, not of war, truly, but of a fairly lively contest with
the elements which were very angry indeed.

There had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night--or
a night of hate (it isn't for nothing that the North Sea is also called
the German Ocean)--when all the fury stored in its heart seemed
concentrated on one ship which could do no better than float on her side
in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable
manner. There were on board, besides myself, seventeen men all good and
true, including a round enormous Dutchman who, in those hours between
sunset and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out appearance somehow,
became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a good long time moved in
our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. The
whimpering of our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out
of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his
nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before
the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian),
his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the gusts of that black,
savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses
than the green overcoat and the white cap of the German passenger
circling the deck indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating children.

"That's a very nice gentleman." This information, together with the fact