t to be as a child. And this
childlike submission to discipline has its pathetic side, as when one
saw the little family of mother and children grouped to see the last of
its head. The children stood in wide-eyed amazement to see daddy the
Reservist, who in the little household had been the emblem of all
authority, now in the place of obedience, and taking directions from
another man (not so big and strong as he) as to how he should stand and
into what hole he should put the buckle of his strap. Thus even the
father and the husband are absorbed in the soldier. It is a great price;
and the way in which it was paid by so many was perhaps our firmest
assurance of the stuff that is in our soldiers.

Early on the morning of departure a few hundred people--mostly
women--stood on the pierhead of Canada Dock, watching the transport as
she lay a short distance off in the stream with the Blue Peter at her
fore and the St. George's ensign hanging astern. The rain beat steadily
down, loading the raw wind that blew out of the morning twilight, and
the brown water broke sullenly to the send of a setting flood tide. The
faces of nearly all the women were worn with weeping; now they wept no
longer, but looked dully out to sea, while the rain ran down their
soaking garments and splashed on the ground. A drunken soldier who had
somehow got ashore the night before reeled helplessly on his wife's arm,
his head bruised and cut and his new uniform torn and filthy. But in the
woman's face there was a kind of fearful joy; she had rescued him from
his pot-house satellites, and she thought she could keep him. Presently
a tug came off from the transport with a picket to collect deserters--he
had to go. She sobbed and wailed, imploring the sergeant in vain; and
she clung to her poor senseless husband as though she would never leave
him. He hardly knew her; he laughed vacantly in her face when with
streaming eyes she begged him to speak her name; then they took him away
from her. As the tug steamed out I heard him singing.

A little while afterwards the _Canada's_ siren began to wail and squeal
with a horrible mockery of painful cries. The tugs backed clear of her,
and lent their shrill voices to the discordant concert. Presently the
water astern of the transport turned from brown to foaming white, and
her masts began to move past the farther shore. There was a faint sound
of cheering from her, but she was soon out of sound and sight, and still
th