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 the 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 blows cool and pure along the corridors, that is like nothing else. The company on the Titanic woke up on Friday morning to begin in earnest their four days of isolated life. Our traveller, who has found out so many things about the ship, has not found out everything yet; and he continues his explorations, with the advantage, perhaps, of a special permit from the Captain or Chief Engineer to explore other quarters of the floating city besides that in which he lives. Let us, with him, try to form some general conception of the internal arrangements of the ship.

The great superstructure of decks amidships which catches the eye so prominently in a picture or photograph, was but, in reality, a small part, although the most luxurious part, of the vessel. Speaking roughly, one might describe it as consisting of three decks, five hundred feet long, devoted almost exclusively to the accommodation of first-class passengers, with the exception of the officers’ quarters (situated immediately aft of the bridge on the top deck of all), and the second-class smoking-room and library, at the after end of the superstructure on the third and fourth decks. With these exceptions, in this great four-storied building were situated all the most magnificent and palatial accommodations of the ship. Immediately beneath it, amidships, in the steadiest part of the vessel where any movement would be least felt, was the first-class dining saloon, with the pantries and kitchens immediately aft of it. Two decks below it were the third-class dining saloons and kitchens; below them again, separated by a heavy steel deck, were the boiler-rooms and coal bunkers, resting on the cellular double bottom of the ship. Immediately aft of the boiler-rooms came the two engine-rooms; the forward and larger one of the two contained the reciprocating engines which drove the twin screws, and the after one the turbine engine for driving the large centre propeller.

Forward and aft of this centre part of the ship, which in reality occupied about two-thirds of her whole length, were two smaller sections, divided (again one speaks roughly) between second-class accommodation, stores and cargo in the stern section, and third-class berths, crew’s quarters and cargo in the bow section. But although the first-class accommodation was all amidships, and the second-class all aft, that of the third-class was scattered about in such blank spaces as could be found for it. Thus most of the berths were forward, immediately behind the fo’c’stle, some were right aft; the dining-room was amidships, and the smoke-room in the extreme stern, over the rudder; and to enjoy a smoke or game of cards a third-class passenger who was berthed forward would have to walk the whole length of the ship and back again, a walk not far short of half a mile. This gives one an idea of how much more the ship resembled a town than a house. A third-class passenger did not walk from his bedroom to his parlour; he walked from the house where he lived in the forward part of the ship to the club a quarter of a mile away where he was to meet his friends.

If, thinking of the Titanic storming along westward across the Atlantic, you could