e Channel, sunlit or dim
with mist or rain, or lighted and bright at night like the main street
of a city; the last outpost, the Lizard, with its high gray cliffs,
green-roofed, with tiny homesteads perched on the ridge; or Ushant, that
tall monitory tower upstanding on the melancholy misty flats; or the
solitary Fastnet, lonely, ultimate and watching--these form the familiar
overture to the subsequent isolation and vacancy of the long road
itself. There are the same day and night of disturbance, the vacant
places at table, the prone figures, swathed and motionless in
deck-chairs, the morning of brilliant sunshine, when the light that
streams into the cabins has a vernal strangeness and wonder for
town-dimmed eyes; the gradual emergence of new faces and doubtful
staggering back of the demoralized to the blessed freshness of the upper
air; the tentative formation of groups and experimental alliances, the
rapid disintegration of these and re-formation on entirely new lines;
and then that miracle of unending interest and wonder, that the faces
that were only the blurred material of a crowd begin one by one to
emerge from the background and detach themselves from the mass, to take
on identity, individuality, character, till what was a crowd of
uninteresting, unidentified humanity becomes a collection of individual
persons with whom one's destinies for the time are strangely and
unaccountably bound up; among whom one may have acquaintances, friends,
or perhaps enemies; who for the inside of a week are all one's world of
men and women.

There are few alterative agents so powerful and sure in their working as
latitude and longitude; and as we slide across new degrees, habit,
association, custom, and ideas slip one by one imperceptibly away from
us; we come really into a new world, and if we had no hearts and no
memories we should soon become different people. But the heart lives its
own life, spinning gossamer threads that float away astern across time
and space, joining us invisibly to that which made and fashioned us, and
to which we hope to return.

IV

Wonderful, even for experienced travellers, is that first waking to a
day on which there shall be no sight of the shore, and the first of
several days of isolation in the world of a ship. There is a quality in
the morning sunshine at sea as it streams into the ship and is reflected
in the white paint and sparkling water of the bath-rooms, and in the
breeze that b