chapter of my _Thousand-and-One Nights_ come true, and I
remembered the gray barracks at Limerick and the incessant drill.

At last we marched back through the docks and aboard the Canada. Next
morning we were sailing far away upon a blue sea. Just a glimpse of
the city of wonderful colour and we were once more creeping closer and
closer to the mystery of our unknown venture.

Many of us would never pass that way again--and each one wondered
sometimes if he would be claimed by that Mechanical Death which none of
us fully realised.

Only a few short hours--a day or two longer--and we should be plunged
into battle. A bullet for one, shrapnel for another, dysentery for a
third, a bayonet or death from weakness and starvation.

The great game of luck was gathering faster and faster. We loafed about
on deck and wondered where we were going and what it would be like...
our minds were thinking of the immediate future. Each one tried to make
out he didn't care, but each one was thinking upon the same subject--his
luck, fate, kismet. How many would return to old England--should I be
one; or would the Eastern sunshine blaze down upon my decomposing body
on some barren sandy shore?

We passed many of the Greek Islands--some came up pink and mauve out
of the sea, others were green with vineyards; once or twice a little
triangular-sailed boat bobbed along the coast.

The uncertainty was a strain, and we felt utterly cut off, until at
last we sighted a sandy streak, and later a line of volcanic-looking
peaks--the Isle of Lemnos.

CHAPTER IX. MAROONED ON LEMNOS ISLAND

LEMNOS HARBOUR

Within the outer anchorage
The ancient Argonauts lay to;
Little they dreamt--that dauntless crew--
That here to-day in the sheltered bay
Where the seas are still and blue,
Great battle-ships should froth and
hum, And mighty transport-vessels come
Serenely floating through.

With magic sail the Argonauts
Stood by to go about;
Little they thought--that hero band--
As they made once more for an unknown land
In a world of terror and doubt,
That here in the wake of the magical bough
Should come the all-terrible ironclad now
Serenely floating out.

Written on Mudros Beach: Oct. 7, 1915.

July the twenty-seventh.

The deadly silence...

The tenderfoot on an expedition of this sort naturally expects t