tion on the globe is known
only to underwriters and shipbrokers; it is that sort of place. It is a
mere name, like Fernando de Noronha, or Key West, which one meets only
in the shipping news, idly wondering then what strange things the
seafarer would find if he went.

Late one night, down a main street of Tampa, there came, with the
deliberate movement of fate, a gigantic corridor train, looming as high
as a row of lighted villas, and drawn by the awful engine of a dream.
That train behaved there as trams do at home, presently stopping
alongside a footway.

Behind me was a little wooden shop. In front was the wall of a
carriage, having an entrance on the second storey, and a roof athwart
the meridian stars. One of its wheels was the nearest and most dominant
object in the night to me, a monstrous bright round resting on a muddy
newspaper in the road. It absorbed all the light from the little wooden
shop. Now, I had hunted throughout Tampa for its railway terminus,
fruitlessly; but here its train had found me, keeping me from crossing
the road.

"Where do I board this train for New York?" I asked. (I talked like a
fool, I know; it was like asking a casual wayfarer in East Ham whether
that by the kerb is the Moscow express. Yet what was I to do?) "Board
her right here," said the fellow, who was in his shirt sleeves.
Therefore I delivered myself, in blind faith, to the casual gods who
are apt to wake up and by a series of deft little miracles get things
done fitly in America when all seems lost and the traveller has even
bared his resigned neck to the stroke.

But I had not the least hope of seeing New York and a Cunarder; not
with such an unpropitious start as that. With an exit like Euston one
never doubts sure direction, and arrival at the precise spot at the
exact moment. You feel there it was arranged for in Genesis. The
officials cannot alter affairs. They are priests administering
inviolate rites, advancing matters fore-ordained by the unseen, and so
no more able to stay or speed this cosmic concern than the astronomer
who schedules the planets. The planets take their heavenly courses. But
I had never been to the United States before, did not know even the
names of their many gods, and New York was at the end of a great
journey; and the train for it stopped outside a tobacco shop in the
road, like a common tram.

There was another night when, with the usual unreason, the swift and
luxurious glide, lessening t