From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along
like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few,
very scattered, and tossing restlessly on an ever dissolving, ever re-
forming sky-line.
Those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the
emptiness of the decks, favouring my reminiscent mood. It might have
been a day of five and thirty years ago, when there were on this and
every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. Yet, thanks
to the unchangeable sea I could have given myself up to the illusion of a
revised past, had it not been for the periodical transit across my gaze
of a German passenger. He was marching round and round the boat deck
with characteristic determination. Two sturdy boys gambolled round him
in his progress like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet.
He was bringing them home, from their school in England, for their
holiday. What could have induced such a sound Teuton to entrust his
offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and
criminal country I cannot imagine. It could hardly have been from
motives of economy.
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