In a steamer chair a frail-looking young woman in a white polo coat looked nervously out on the sea. She was Irish and came of a fighting line--father, uncles, and brothers in army and navy, her husband in command of a British cruiser, scouting the very steamship lane through which we were steaming. Frail-looking, but not frail in spirit--a fighter born, with Irish keenness and wit, she was ready to prick any balloon in sight. She had chased about the world too long after a fighting family to care much about settling down now. They couldn't afford to keep a place in England and live somewhere else half the time --"and, after all, what is there in being a cabbage?" She talked little. "You can learn more about people merely watching them," and she lay in her steamer chair and watched. She could tell, merely by looking at them in their civilian's clothes, which were army and which navy men, which "R.N.s" and which merchant- service men. We spoke of a young lieutenant from an India artillery regiment. "Yes--'garrison-gunner,'" she said. She was sorry for the German people, but the Kaiser was "quite off his rocker and had to be licked." War suddenly reached out for us as we came up to Mersey Bar, and an officer in khaki bellowed from the pilot-boat: "Take down your wireless!" Down it came, and there the ship stayed for the night, while the passengers crowded about a volunteer town-crier who read from the papers that had come aboard, and, in the strange quiet that descends on an anchored steamship, asked each other how true it was that the German military bubble--a magazine article with that title had been much read on the way over--had burst. Slowly next morning we crept up the Mersey, past a rusty tramp outward bound, crowded with khaki-clad men. All the shipping was tooting as she swept by, and the men cheering and waving their hats at the land they might never come back to. The regular landing-stages were taken by transports, tracks were held for troop-trains, and it was night before we got down to London, where crowds and buses stormed along as usual and barytone soloists in every music-hall were roaring defiance to the Kaiser and reiterating that Britannia ruled the waves. Into the fog of war that covered the Continent an army of Englishmen had vanished, none knew where. Out of it came rumors of victories, but as I crossed the Strand that morning on the way to Charing Cross, a newsboy pushed an extra into the cab window--the Germans were entering Brussels! Yet we fought into the boat train just as if thousands of people weren't fighting to get away from the very places we hoped to reach.