cealed in the
depths of the ship, and he thought they were very well where they were.
His eldest son was about the decks somewhere.

"We are Americans," he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar tone.
He spoke English with the accent of our captain's "wonderful people," and
proceeded to give me the history of the family's crossing the Atlantic in
a White Star liner. They remained in England just the time necessary for
a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the
depths of the ship) were naturally a little tired.

At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from
the fore-deck in a state of intense elation. "Hurrah," he cried under
his breath. "The first German light! Hurrah!"

And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest
fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant
wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness. The
shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.

I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights. The
great change of sea life since my time was brought home to me. I had
been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers. They
went on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade
of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head sea
and bound for the gateway of Dover Straits. Singly, and in small
companies of two and three, they emerged from the dull, colourless,
sunless distances ahead as if the supply of rather roughly finished
mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away
there, below the grey curve of the earth. Cargo steam vessels have
reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one
reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe
into one. These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port,
and with an added touch of the ridiculous. Their rolling waddle when
seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so
unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them
something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble
predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers,
conceited and without grace.

When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo tanks carried tame
lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps
they span