ters and a _maitre d'hotel_
from Paris, and all the perfection of that perfect and expensive service
which condescends to give you a meal for something under a five-pound
note; where, surrounded by Louis Seize panelling of fawn-coloured
walnut, you may on this April evening eat your plovers' eggs and
strawberries, and drink your 1900 Clicquot, and that in perfect oblivion
of the surrounding sea. Afterwards, perhaps, a stroll on the deck amid
groups of people, not swathed in pea-jackets or oilskins, but attired as
though for the opera; and all the time, in an atmosphere golden with
light, and musical with low-talking voices and the yearning strains of a
waltz, driving five-and-twenty miles an hour westward, with the black
night and the sea all about us. And then to bed, not in a bunk in a
cabin but in a bedstead in a quiet room with a telephone through which
to speak to any one of two thousand people, and a message handed in
before you go to sleep that someone wrote in New York since you rose
from the dinner-table.

The next morning the scene at Cherbourg was repeated, with the fair
green shores of Cork Harbour instead of the cliffs of France for its
setting; and then quietly, without fuss, in the early afternoon of
Thursday, out round the green point, beyond the headland, and the great
ship has steadied on her course and on the long sea-road at last. How
worn it is! How seamed and furrowed and printed with the track-lines of
journeys innumerable; how changing, and yet how unchanged--the road that
leads to Archangel or Sicily, to Ceylon or to the frozen Pole; the old
road that leads to the ruined gateways of Phoenicia, of Venice, of Tyre;
the new road that leads to new lives and new lands; the dustless road,
the long road that all must travel who in body or in spirit would really
discover a new world. And travel on it as you may for tens of thousands
of miles, you come back to it always with the same sense of expectation,
never wholly disappointed; and always with the same certainty that you
will find at the turn or corner of the road, either some new thing or
the renewal of something old.

There is no human experience in which the phenomena of small varieties
within one large monotony are so clearly exemplified as in a sea-voyage.
The dreary beginnings of docks, of baggage, and soiled harbour water;
the quite hopeless confusion of strange faces--faces entirely collective,
comprising a mere crowd; the busy highway of th