vibrated for an instant.  It was the Atlantic wave, caressing.  Anybody on the other side of this thin, nicely painted steel plate (I thought) would be in a rather hopeless situation.  I turned away, half shivering, from the menace.  All was calm and warm and reassuring within the ship....  In the withdrawn privacy of my berth, with the curtains closed over the door and Murray Gilchrist’s new novel in my hand and a poised electric lamp over my head, I looked about as I lay, and everything was still except a towel that moved gently, almost imperceptibly, to and fro.  Yet the towel had copied the immobility of the star.  It alone did not oscillate.  Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not that towel.  The sense of actual present romance was too strong to let me read.  I extinguished the light, and listened in the dark to the faint straining noises of the enormous organism.  I thought:  “This magic thing is taking me there!  In three days I shall be on that shore.”  Terrific adventure!  The rest of the passengers were merely going to America.

* * * * *

The magic thing was much more magic than I had conceived.  The next morning, being up earlier than usual and wandering about on strange, inclosed decks unfamiliar to my feet, I beheld astonishing unsuspected populations of men and women—­crowds of them—­a healthy, powerful, prosperous, independent, somewhat stern and disdainful multitude, it seemed to me.  Those muscular, striding girls in caps and shawls would not yield an inch to me in their promenade; they brushed strongly and carelessly past me; had I been a ghost they would have walked through me.  They were, and had been, all living—­eating and sleeping—­somewhere within the vessel, and I had not imagined it!  It is true that some ass in the saloon had already calculated for my benefit that there were “three thousand souls on board!” (The solemn use of the word “souls” in this connection by a passenger should stamp a man forever.) But such numerical statements do not really arouse the imagination.  I had to see with my eyes.  And I did see with my eyes.  That afternoon a high officer of the ship, spiriting me away from the polite flirtations and pastimes of the upper decks, carried me down to more exciting scenes.  And I saw a whole string of young women inoculated against smallpox, under the interested gaze of a crowd of men ranged on a convenient staircase.  And a little later I saw a whole string of men inoculated against smallpox, under the interested gaze of a crowd of young women ranged on a convenient staircase.

“They’re having their sweet revenge,” said the high officer, indicating the young women.  He was an epigrammatic and terse speaker.  When I reflected aloud upon the order and discipline of service which was necessary to maintain more than a thousand roughish persons in idleness, cleanliness, health, peace, and content, in the inelastic forward spaces of the ship, he said with a certain grimness:  “Everything has to be screwed up as tight as you can screw it.  And you must keep to the round.  What you do to-day you must do to-morrow.  But what you don’t do to-day you can’t get done to-morrow.”