Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their colouring and texture.  Evening was coming on over the North Sea.  Black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water and clouds in the Eastern board:  tops of islands fringing the German shore.  While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves—­and for all their solidity they were very elusive things in the failing light—­another passenger came out on deck.  This one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap.  The yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed his chest.  His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of short white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that it determined the whole character of his physiognomy.  Indeed nothing else in it had the slightest chance to assert itself.  His disposition, unlike the widower’s, appeared to be mild and humane.  He offered me the loan of his glasses.  He had a wife and some small children concealed in the depths of the ship, and he thought they were very well where they were.  His eldest son was about the decks somewhere.

“We are Americans,” he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar tone.  He spoke English with the accent of our captain’s “wonderful people,” and proceeded to give me the history of the family’s crossing the Atlantic in a White Star liner.  They remained in England just the time necessary for a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich.  His people (those in the depths of the ship) were naturally a little tired.

At that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation.  “Hurrah,” he cried under his breath.  “The first German light!  Hurrah!”

And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness.  The shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.

I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights.  The great change of sea life since my time was brought home to me.  I had been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers.  They went on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head sea and bound for the gateway of Dover Straits.  Singly, and in small companies of two and three, they emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances ahead as if the supply of rather roughly finished mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away there, below the grey curve of the earth.  Cargo steam vessels have reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one.  These dismal