is
the green sea. A business-like-looking group have just settled down to
bridge in the first-class smoking-room. The sea does not exist for them,
nor the ship; the roses that bloom upon the trellis-work by the verandah
interest them no more than the pageant of white clouds which they could
see if they looked out of the wide windows. Down below the chief
steward, attended by his satellites, is visiting the stores and getting
from the store-keeper the necessaries for his day's catering. He has
plenty to draw from. In those cold chambers behind the engine-room are
gathered provisions which seem almost inexhaustible for any population;
for the imagination does not properly take in the meaning of such items
as a hundred thousand pounds of beef, thirty thousand fresh eggs, fifty
tons of potatoes, a thousand pounds of tea, twelve hundred quarts of
cream. In charge of the chief steward also, to be checked by him at the
end of each voyage, are the china and glass, the cutlery and plate of
the ship, amounting in all to some ninety thousand pieces. But there he
is, quietly at work with the store-keeper; and not far from him, in
another room or series of rooms, another official dealing with the
thousands upon thousands of pieces of linen for bed and table with which
the town is supplied.

Everything is on a monstrous scale. The centre anchor, which it took a
team of sixteen great horses to drag on a wooden trolley, weighs over
fifteen tons; its cable will hold a dead weight of three hundred tons.
The very rudder, that mere slender and almost invisible appendage under
the counter, is eighty feet high and weighs a hundred tons. The men on
the look-out do not climb up the shrouds and ratlines in the old sea
fashion; the mast is hollow and contains a stairway; there is a door in
it from which they come out to take their place in the crow's nest.

Are you weary of such statistics? They were among the things on which
men thought with pride on those sunny April days in the Atlantic. Man
can seldom think of himself apart from his environment, and the house
and place in which he lives are ever a preoccupation with all men. From
the clerk in his little jerry-built villa to the king in his castle,
what the house is, what it is built of, how it is equipped and adorned,
are matters of vital interest. And if that is true of land, where all
the webs of life are connected and intercrossed, how much more must it
be true when a man sets his house