r bulwarks and ports crowded with white helmets, and eager
faces gazing at the equally eager but anxious faces on shore.

Miss Robinson's coffee-shed shows signs of life! Our friend Brown is
stimulating the boiler. The great solitary port-hole has been opened,
and the never-failing lady-workers are there, preparing their ammunition
and getting ready for action, for every troop-ship that comes to
Portsmouth from foreign shores, laden with the bronzed warriors of
Britain, has to face the certainty of going into action with that
unconquerable little coffee-shed!

We do not, however, mean to draw the reader again through the old scene,
further than to point out that, among the many faces that loom over
these bulwarks, five are familiar, namely, those of our friends Miles
Milton, William Armstrong, Moses Pyne, Stevenson, and Simkin. Jack
Molloy is not with them, because he has preferred to remain in Egypt,
believing himself to be capable of still further service to Queen and
country.

A feeling of great disappointment oppresses Miles and his friend
Armstrong, for they fail to recognise in the eager crowd those whom they
had expected to see.

"My mother must be ill," muttered Miles.

"So must my Emmy," murmured his friend.

There was a very anxious little widow on the jetty who could _not_
manage to distinguish individuals in the sea of brown faces and white
helmets, because the tears in her eyes mixed them all up most
perplexingly. It is not surprising that Miles had totally failed to
recognise the mother of old in the unfamiliar widow's weeds--especially
when it is considered that his was a shrinking, timid mother, who kept
well in the background of the demonstrative crowd. Their eyes met at
last, however, and those of the widow opened wide with surprise at the
change in the son, while those of the son were suddenly blinded with
tears at the change in the mother.

Then they met--and such a meeting!--in the midst of men and women,
elbowing, crowding, embracing, exclaiming, rejoicing, chaffing, weeping!
It was an awkward state of things, but as every one else was in the
same predicament, and as all were more or less swallowed up in their own
affairs, Miles and his mother were fain to make the best of it. They
retired under the partial shelter of a bulkhead, where block-tackles and
nautical debris interfered with their footing, and tarry odours regaled
their noses, and there, in semi-publicity, they interchanged