Any sailor who was met with casually was hoisted shoulder-high and carried through the thoroughfares amid cheering crowds. Thousands stood bare-headed before the Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square, while a young girl, with rapt face and glowing eyes, standing on the masonry, recited Tennyson’s National Song: “There is no land like England Where’er the light of day be; There are no hearts like English hearts-- Such hearts of oak as they be.” A vast concourse also assembled before the broad façade of Buckingham Palace; and, undeterred by its silent emptiness and the myriads of white blinds, all drawn down, shouted lustily and again and again for King and Queen. “Three cheers for the Navy!” roared a stentorian voice, and with a swift and mighty response the crowd gave not three cheers, but nearer thirty. The next day, and the day after, and the day after that, the noise and the excitement were continued almost without abatement. Meanwhile there had taken place at Windsor Castle, amid surroundings of quietude and regal dignity, an interview fraught with great import to England, to Germany, and to the whole of Europe. Two mighty monarchs, constitutional rulers of great empires, came face to face, in circumstances of unexampled interest and embarrassment. It was a supreme moment, stupendous in the main problem that it presented, subtle and painful in the side-issues which that problem involved. For these were men, as well as monarchs. Not only were they men with like passions as we ourselves have, but the blood of a common ancestor flowed through the veins of each. The two were kith and kin. Nothing mean or petty could be said or done by King or Kaiser in that trying hour. The salutation of royal personages must be exchanged after the custom of the Courts. The ritual of State observance must be followed in all its detail. Yet, notwithstanding these formalities, each exalted personage was acutely conscious of the rough, the tragic, underlying elements of the unexampled situation. Neither could forget in that ironic moment the bombastic utterances of the royal captive, the vapouring allusion to the “mailed fist,” the “dry powder,” the “taut muscles,” and all the rest of it. Graver still were the recollections of the inspired press campaign against Great Britain, the manufactured grievances, the falsely imputed intrigues, all sequent to the unfriendly spirit shown in the memorable telegram to the President of the South African Republic. Worse than all was the evidence of enmity and jealousy afforded by the persistent increase of the German navy, the injurious uses to which Heligoland had been put, the enlargement of the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, and the partial construction of a new naval base for the German fleet in the North Sea.