uld talk a little, for my own comfort partly, and
also because I am sticking all the time to my subject to illustrate my
point, the point of manageableness which I have raised just now. Since
the memory of the lucky _Arizona_ has been evoked by others than myself,
and made use of by me for my own purpose, let me call up the ghost of
another ship of that distant day whose less lucky destiny inculcates
another lesson making for my argument. The _Douro_, a ship belonging to
the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, was rather less than one-tenth the
measurement of the _Titanic_. Yet, strange as it may appear to the
ineffable hotel exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class Cross-
Atlantic Passengers, people of position and wealth and refinement did not
consider it an intolerable hardship to travel in her, even all the way
from South America; this being the service she was engaged upon. Of her
speed I know nothing, but it must have been the average of the period,
and the decorations of her saloons were, I dare say, quite up to the
mark; but I doubt if her birth had been boastfully paragraphed all round
the Press, because that was not the fashion of the time. She was not a
mass of material gorgeously furnished and upholstered. She was a ship.
And she was not, in the apt words of an article by Commander C.
Crutchley, R.N.R., which I have just read, "run by a sort of hotel
syndicate composed of the Chief Engineer, the Purser, and the Captain,"
as these monstrous Atlantic ferries are. She was really commanded,
manned, and equipped as a ship meant to keep the sea: a ship first and
last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact I am going to relate
will show.

She was off the Spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full, just like
the _Titanic_; and further, the proportion of her crew to her passengers,
I remember quite well, was very much the same. The exact number of souls
on board I have forgotten. It might have been nearly three hundred,
certainly not more. The night was moonlit, but hazy, the weather fine
with a heavy swell running from the westward, which means that she must
have been rolling a great deal, and in that respect the conditions for
her were worse than in the case of the _Titanic_. Some time either just
before or just after midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was
run into amidships and at right angles by a large steamer which after the
blow backed out, and, herself apparently damaged,