e two gray horses
were summoned to their greatest task; when, with necks proudly arched
and their white manes flung higher than ever, they escorted the
_Titanic_ between the islands out to sea.

II

At noon on Wednesday, 10th April 1912, the _Titanic_ started from
Southampton on her maiden voyage. Small enough was her experience of the
sea before that day. Many hands had handled her; many tugs had fussed
about her, pulling and pushing her this way and that as she was
manoeuvred in the waters of Belfast Lough and taken out to the entrance
to smell the sea. There she had been swung and her compasses adjusted.
Three or four hours had sufficed for her trial trip, and she had first
felt her own power in the Irish Sea, when all her new machinery working
together, at first with a certain reserve and diffidence, had tested and
tried its various functions, and she had come down through St. George's
Channel and round by the Lizard, and past the Eddystone and up the
Solent to Southampton Water, feeling a little hustled and strange, no
doubt, but finding this business of ploughing the seas surprisingly easy
after all. And now, on the day of sailing, amid the cheers of a crowd
unusually vast even for Southampton Docks, the largest ship in the world
slid away from the deep-water jetty to begin her sea life in earnest.

In the first few minutes her giant powers made themselves felt. As she
was slowly gathering way she passed the liner _New York_, another ocean
monarch, which was lying like a rock moored by seven great hawsers of
iron and steel. As the _Titanic_ passed, some mysterious compelling
influence of the water displaced by her vast bulk drew the _New York_
towards her; snapped one by one the great steel hawsers and pulled the
liner from the quayside as though she had been a cork. Not until she was
within fifteen feet of the _Titanic_, when a collision seemed imminent,
did the ever-present tugs lay hold of her and haul her back to
captivity.

Even to the most experienced traveller the first few hours on a new ship
are very confusing; in the case of a ship like this, containing the
population of a village, they are bewildering. So the eight hours spent
by the _Titanic_ in crossing from Southampton to Cherbourg would be
spent by most of her passengers in taking their bearings, trying to find
their way about and looking into all the wonders of which the voyage
made them free. There were luxuries enough in the second cl