What other alchemical changes have
been wrought only these lean and weary men could know--if they dared
look so far within themselves. And even if they dared, they would not
tell.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] In old days before the "improvements."
II.
THE FAREWELL.
We boarded ship, filled with a great, and what seemed to us, an
unappeasable curiosity as to what we were going to see. It was not a
very big ship, in spite of the grandiloquent descriptions in the
advertisements, or the lithograph wherein she cut grandly and evenly
through huge waves to the manifest discomfiture of infinitesimal sailing
craft bobbing alongside. She was manned entirely by Germans. The room
stewards waited at table, cleaned the public saloons, kept the library,
rustled the baggage, and played in the band. That is why we took our
music between meals. Our staterooms were very tiny indeed. Each was
provided with an electric fan; a totally inadequate and rather
aggravating electric fan once we had entered the Red Sea. Just at this
moment we paid it little attention, for we were still in full enjoyment
of sunny France, where, in our own experience, it had rained two months
steadily. Indeed, at this moment it was raining, raining a steady, cold,
sodden drizzle that had not even the grace to pick out the surface of
the harbour in the jolly dancing staccato that goes far to lend
attraction to a genuinely earnest rainstorm.
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