g of cats. They were going to the war. Their officers lived
in the staterooms in the center of the ship, taking with them their
families who had acquired a foreign aspect during their long residence
in the colonies.

Ulysses saw ladies clad in white stretched out on their steamer chairs,
having themselves fanned by their little Chinese pages; he saw bronzed
and weather-beaten soldiers who appeared disgusted yet galvanized by
the war that was snatching them from their Asiatic siesta, and
children,--many children--delighted to go to France, the country of
their dreams, forgetting in their happiness that their fathers were
probably going to their death.

The passage could not have been smoother. The Mediterranean was like a
silver plain in the moonlight. From the invisible coast came warm puffs
of garden perfumes. The groups on deck reminded one another, with
selfish satisfaction, of the great dangers that threatened the people
embarking in the North Sea, harassed by German submarines. Fortunately
the Mediterranean was free from such calamity. The English had so well
guarded the port of Gibraltar that it was all a tranquil lake dominated
by the Allies.

Before going to bed, the captain entered a room on the upper deck where
was installed the wireless telegraph outfit. The hissing as of frying
oil that the apparatus was sending out attracted him. The operator, a
young Englishman, took off his nickel band with two earphones. Greatly
bored by his isolation, he was trying to distract himself by conversing
with the operators on the other vessels that came within the radius of
his apparatus. They kept in constant communication like a group of
comrades making the same trip and conversing placidly together.

From time to time the operator, advised by the sparking of his
induction coils, would put on the diadem with ear pieces in order to
listen to his far-away comrades.

"It is the man on the _Californian_ bidding me goodnight," he said
after one of these calls. "He is going to bed. There's no news."

And the young man eulogized Mediterranean navigation. At the outbreak
of the war, he had been on another vessel going from London to New York
and he recalled the unquiet nights, the days of anxious vigilance,
searching the sea and the atmosphere, fearing from one moment to
another the appearance of a periscope upon the waters, or the electric
warning of a steamer torpedoed by the submarine. On this sea, one could
live as tranq