gled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here,
there, and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out
to sea. Later, Heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its
powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the
clouds.

I remained on deck until we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so
overlighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape,
glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. I fear that the oar,
as a working implement, will become presently as obsolete as the sail.
The pilot boarded us in a motor-dinghy. More and more is mankind
reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little
wheels. Progress! Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces
demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits. And
readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles
made a more complete man.

It was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran to and fro like a
water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance.
Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe lightship floated all dark and
silent under its enormous round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow
watching the broad estuary full of lights.

Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace
ready for flight away from the luckless shores of Europe. Our visual
impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it extremely
difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark
over there, that the Elbe lightship has been towed away from its post of
duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat
laid up, or turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to do. And
obviously it must be so.

Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping
along cautiously with the unlighted, war-blighted black coast close on
one hand, and sudden death on the other. For all the space we steamed
through that Sunday evening must now be one great minefield, sown thickly
with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very
spot perhaps where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so
much fussy importance. Mines; Submarines. The last word in sea-warfare!
Progress--impressively disclosed by this war.

There have been other wars! Wars not inferior in the greatness of the
stake and in the fierce animosity of feelings. D