nch; it is universal.

And never can Marseilles have been so universal as in the early days of
August 1914. Usually a port of call only, then it was a terminus. The
ships came in, but did not leave: there seemed to be a concensus of
opinion amongst skippers that the _Goeben_ was a nasty thing to meet
alone on a dark night. And so the overcrowded docks filled up with
waiting vessels, while Lascars and Levantine Greeks, Cingalese and
Chinamen, jostled one another in the cafes.

The other jostlers were principally Americans of fabulous wealth: at
least as they thronged the shipping offices they said so. Also they
were very angry, which is where they differed from the Cingalese and
Chinamen, who liked Marseilles and prayed to remain for ever. But the
Americans desired to return to God's own country--they and their wives
and their sons and daughters; moreover, they expressed their desire
fluently and frequently. There is something stupendous about an
American magnate insisting on his rights on a hot day, when he can't
get them. . . . It cheers a man up when he is waiting and
wondering--and England is still silent.

It was just as Draycott had made the unpleasant discovery that no
longer did the weekly boat run from Marseilles to Tunis and thence to
Malta, and was debating on the rival merits of a journey through Italy,
and thence by Syracuse to the island of goats; or a journey through
Spain to Gibraltar, and thence by sea--with luck, that a railway
magnate entered and gave his celebrated rendering of a boiler
explosion. It appeared--when every one had partially recovered--that
he was the proud possessor of ten francs and three sous. He also
admitted to a wife suffering from something with a name that hurt, and
various young railway magnates of both sexes. It transpired that the
ten francs and three sous had been laboriously collected from his
_menage_ only that morning; that the youngest hopeful had wept
copiously on losing her life's savings; and further, that it was the
limit of his resources. He had letters of credit, or something
dangerous of that sort, to the extent of a few million; he was prepared
to buy the whole one-donkey country by a stroke of the pen, but--in
hard cash--he had ten francs and three sous. . . .

It was pathetic; it was dreadful. An American multi-millionaire, one
of those strange beings of whom one reads, who corner tin-tacks and
things, and ruin or make thousands with a word, redu