for danger, disregard of death, the intention to live; a final, weary estimate of the fact that mere things are as unimportant here as there, no matter how quaintly or fantastically they are dressed or named, and a corresponding emptiness of anticipation for the future—­these items are only a random few of the price given by the ancient lands for that which the northern races bring to them.  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.

Down the long quay splashed cabs and omnibuses, their drivers glistening in wet capes, to discharge under the open shed at the end various hasty individuals who marshalled long lines of porters with astonishing impedimenta and drove them up the gang-plank.  A half-dozen roughs lounged aimlessly.  A little bent old woman with a shawl over her head searched here and there.  Occasionally she would find a twisted splinter of wood torn from the piles by a hawser or gouged from the planking by heavy freight, or kicked from the floor by the hoofs of horses.  This she deposited carefully in a small covered market basket.  She was entirely intent on this minute and rather pathetic task, quite unattending the greatness of the ship, or the many people the great hulk swallowed or spat forth.