Much happened between the day when I mailed my proofs from the big Post Office on Canal Street in New Orleans, and the day when I set out to write this present version. I was now in another hemisphere and the world was at war. By a happy chance I laid hold of a copy of _Aliens_, sent previously to a naval relative serving on the same station. Up and down the AEgean Sea, past fields of mines and fields of asphodel, past many an isle familiar in happier days to me, I took my book and my new convictions about human folly. It was a slow business, for it so chanced that my own contribution to the war involved long hours. But _Aliens_ grew. And one evening, I remember, I left off in the middle of Mr. Carville's courtship and went to bed. We were speeding southward. It was a dark, moonless night. The islands of the Grecian Archipelago were roofed over with a vault of low-lying clouds, as if those ferriferous hummocks and limestone peaks were the invisible pillars of an enormous crypt. And since across the floor of this crypt many other vessels were speeding without lights, it was not wonderful that for once our good fortune failed us. For we had had good fortune. Aeroplanes had bombed, and missed us by yards. Zeppelins had come down in flaming ruin before our astonished eyes. Islands had loomed under the very fore-foot of our ship in a fog, and we had gone astern in time. But this time it was our turn. We were, in the succinct phraseology of the sea, in collision. The story of that night will no doubt be told in its proper place and time. Suffice it that for some weeks we were laid aside, and local Levantine talent invoked to make good the disaster. And in spite of the clangour of rivetters, the unceasing cries of fezzed and turbaned mechanics, and the heavy blows of sweating carpenters, caulkers and blacksmiths, _Aliens_ grew. There was a blessed interval, between five o'clock, when my day's work ended, and the late cabin-dinner at six-thirty, when the setting sun shone into my room and illumined my study-table--a board laid across an open drawer. And _Aliens_ grew. For some time, while the smashed bulwarks and distorted frames of the upper-works were being hacked away outside my window, the uproar was unendurable, and I would go ashore, note-book in pocket, to find a refuge where I could write. I would walk through the city and sit in her gardens; and the story grew. I found obscure _cafes_ where I could sit with coffee and _narghileh_, and watch the Arabic letter-writers worming the thoughts from their inarticulate clients, and _Aliens_ grew. And later, near the Greek Patriarchate, I found that which to me is home--a secondhand book-store. For I mark my passage about this very wonderful world by old book-stores. London, Glasgow, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Genoa, Venice, New York, Ancona, Rouen, Tunis, Savannah, Kobe and New Orleans have in my memory their old book-stores, where I could browse in peace.