away clusters of great wooden boxes marked the
Something Arms Company. "My brother says that American bullets are
filled with powder of a very good quality" (d'une tres bonne qualite),
remarked the latter. "By the way, how is your brother?" asked the
bearded man. "Very much better," answered the other; "the last fragment
(eclat) was taken out of his thigh just before we left Bordeaux." They
continued their walk, and three little French boys wearing English
sailor hats took their places at the rail.

As the afternoon advanced, a yellow summer sun, sinking to a level with
the upper fringes of the city haze, gave a signal for farewells; and
little groups retired to quieter corners for good-byes. There was a good
deal of worrying about submarines; one heard fragments of
conversations--"They never trouble the Bordeaux route"--"Absolutely
safe, je t'assure"; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice,
"Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund,
snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for
"the success of his business." Two young Americans with the same
identical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black
Frenchman, with a frightful star-shaped scar at the corner of his mouth,
paraded lonelily. A middle-aged French woman, rouged and dyed back to
the thirties, and standing in a nimbus of perfume, wept at the going of
a younger woman, and ruined an elaborate make-up with grotesque
traceries of tears. "Give him my love," she sobbed; "tell him that the
business is doing splendidly and that he is not to buy any of Lafitte's
laces next time he goes to Paris en permission." A little later, the
Rochambeau, with slow majesty, backed into the channel, and turned her
bow to the east.

The chief interest of the great majority of her passengers was
commercial; there were American drummers keen to line their pockets with
European profits; there were French commis voyageurs who had been
selling articles of French manufacture which had formerly been made by
the Germans; there were half-official persons who had been on missions
to American ammunition works; and there was a diplomat or two. From the
sample trunks on board you could have taken anything from a pair of
boots to a time fuse. Altogether, an interesting lot. Palandeau, a
middle-aged Frenchman with a domed, bald forehead like Socrates or
Verlaine, had been in America selling eau-de-cologne.

"Then you are gettin