ng the slip of moon setting
early on those April nights for whom time and the world were quite
arrested in their course, and for whom the whole ship and her teeming
activities were but frame and setting for the perfect moment of their
lives; for whom the thronging multitudes of their fellow passengers were
but a blurred background against which the colour of their joy stood
sharp and clear. The fields of foam-flecked blue, sunlit or
cloud-shadowed by day; the starlight on the waters; the slow and
scarcely perceptible swinging of the ship's rail against the violet and
spangled sky; the low murmur of voices, the liquid notes of violins, the
trampling tune of the engines--to how many others have not these been
the properties of a magic world; for how many others, as long as men
continue to go in ships upon the sea, will they not be the symbols of a
joy that is as old as time, and that is found to be new by every
generation! For this also is one of the gifts of the sea, and one of the
territories through which the long road passes.

VII

Sunday came, with nothing to mark it except the morning service in the
saloon--a function that by reason of its novelty, attracts some people at
sea who do not associate it with the shore. One thing, however, fire or
boat muster, which usually marks Sunday at sea, and gives it a little
variety, did not for some reason take place. It is one of the few
variants of the monotony of shipboard life, where anything in the nature
of a spectacle is welcomed; and most travellers are familiar with the
stir caused by the sudden hoarse blast of the foghorn and the subsequent
patter of feet and appearance from below of all kinds of people whose
existence the passenger had hardly suspected. Stewards, sailors,
firemen, engineers, nurses, bakers, butchers, cooks, florists, barbers,
carpenters, and stewardesses, ranged in two immense lines along the boat
deck, answer to their names and are told off, according to their
numbers, to take charge of certain boats. This muster did not take place
on the _Titanic_; if it had it would have revealed to any observant
passenger the fact that the whole crew of nine hundred would have
occupied all the available accommodation in the boats hanging on the
davits and left no room for any passengers. For the men who designed and
built the _Titanic_, who knew the tremendous strength of the girders and
cantilevers and bulkheads which took the thrust and pull of every st