"No, I was not enamoured of what I saw of England. And I found I was reluctant to go to my own home. I suppose it had so many regrettable memories. Anyhow, voyage after voyage I put off my visit, and so one trip, coming home to Tyne Dock, I found I had put it off once too often. My mother, who had been living at Brighton, was dead. It is curious how the sea seems to sterilize the emotions in some natures. Perhaps I am wrong, and judge the general from the particular. Perhaps we are deficient in power to express grief. Perhaps we don't feel it. I don't know. I have known men at sea who raved about their parents' perfections and I was unable to sympathize and regale them with anecdotes about my 'old lady.' I couldn't. I don't remember ever talking to anybody about my mother. That isn't to say for a single instant, however, that I didn't esteem her. We simply were not designed to fit into the same scheme. We were of different generations. We were of cross-grained stuff, if I may say so, dour and tough and ill to match with common deal, and our roots were sunk in the restless, estranging sea. "And so once more I came to London, a wanderer, noting what had been built and what pulled down. London! Never for a single day will they let it alone. It is like some vast cellular organism asprawl on the Thames mud, forever heaving and sweating and rotting and growing. A fungus, a sponge, sucking in the produce of continents, sending out the wealth of empires. I used to stand on London Bridge and watch the steamers loading and discharging from the grimy overhanging warehouses. A busman's holiday, you say. But there didn't seem anything else to do while I was waiting for a ship. I found my old British Museum Reading Room pass among my papers at home and I used it one day to look in upon my bygone haunts. It gave me a shock to see some of the same old grey-haired men and women reading out of the same silly old tomes. Yes! I was almost ready to swear one old girl was at the same page as I left her years before. And the suggestions in the manuscript complaint book! Good Lord! I glanced at it as I wandered round, for it had often amused me in the past to see the weird and wonderful volumes the authorities were asked to procure. And here I found some crazy soul had demanded the first volume of the Chinese Zetetic Society's proceedings. Another complained of a lack of text-books treating of secret societies in the Tenth Century. And the world was going round outside all the time! I looked at them, these men and women--their shoulders humped as they scratched with their absurd quill-pens, their faces pallid with the light reflected from the pages. Some few, as though to show what a farce the whole business could be, had got out a perfect library of books, bastions of them, and lay back in their chairs, snoring. I couldn't bear it. I had to get out. The air was stifling me after the open sea, so I left that