their
last day in Europe. Then there were the nervously-anxious, their peace
of mind already wrecked by the vagaries of the European baggage-system,
who dared not run the risk of arriving at the last moment. So they, too,
journeyed to Cherbourg the day before the sailing-date, in order to have
a clear twenty-four hours in which to search for the pieces which were
certain to be missing. That day at Cherbourg was always an expensive
one, for the hotel-keepers of the place, having to live for seven days
on the proceeds of two, arranged their rates accordingly.

At the edge of the narrow strip of rock-strewn sand which constitutes
the beach at Cherbourg, stands the Grand Hotel--familiar name to every
traveller in Europe, where even the smallest hamlet has its "Grand." The
one at Cherbourg is a rambling, three-storied frame structure, with a
glass-enclosed dining-room overlooking the harbour, and here, at ten
o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of September, in
the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eleven, Daniel Webster was
disconsolately eating that frugal meal which is the French for
breakfast. Not the great Daniel--all well-informed persons are, of
course, aware that he passed to his reward some sixty years ago--but a
well-built, fresh-faced, rather good-looking young fellow, still on the
right side of thirty, who had most inadvisedly chosen to appear in this
world of trouble on the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the
great Daniel, and who had forthwith been handicapped with his name.

John Webster, an honest farmer of the Connecticut valley, had always
been a worshipper at the shrine of the eloquent New Englander, to whom
he fancied himself related, and when, having taken to himself a wife,
that wife presented him with a son on the very day when the centenary of
his hero's birth was being celebrated, the coincidence appeared to him
too momentous to be disregarded, and the boy was christened Daniel.

It was a thing no thoughtful father would have done, and as Dan grew
older, he resented his name bitterly. It was the subject of brutal jests
from his playmates, resulting in numberless pitched battles, and of
still more brutal hazing when he pursued his predestined way through the
portals of the university at New Haven. Here he was promptly
rechristened Ichabod, and his real name was gradually forgotten.

In the depths of his heart, John Webster may perhaps have hoped that
this was to be