Choosing the longest and the cheapest trip across the Channel, I found I could just about get to St. Malo, third class, if I did not have a stateroom. I had a right to occupy one of the berths in the downstairs cabin, but, upon finding it filled with about eighty seasick butter merchants, drinking and yelling, I decided to escape the vile odors and bluff it out on deck, with my ulster to keep me warm. I have never been sick on the water before or since, but the whole situation and my worried state of mind drove me to it, and I shall never forget the pathetic picture I must have made curled up in the scuppers, trampled on by the crew, my greatcoat covering myself and a cabin boy who was making his first trip and was also in a very bad condition. There was a blinding snowstorm, and we lay to the leeward of the Isle of Guernsey, making the crossing last eight hours. Upon landing, the cabin boy recovered first and carried my grip, while I went across the gangplank on all fours and just managed to reach a hotel and telegraph my friend Frank Chadwick, who was down in Concarneau, to bail me out. After such memories, I was rather loath to go back to the great capital of my ancestors, and have never made long visits to London. But the English are gentlemen, and, as gentlemen, have a delicate sense of humor. _Punch_ will be stupid for six months at a time, and all of a sudden will come out with some witty picture or saying that will ring around the world and be remembered for years. London is the center of the English-speaking race, and its opinion goes for all of us; but it seemed like a foreign land to me every time I entered, and I was glad to see that I was not alone in my feeling. I never read the travels of Robert Louis Stevenson that I do not realize that when he went to England he instantly felt himself among strangers. Be that as it may, they do not treat us as they do colonials, toward whom, if they do not ignore them, the shoulder is always hunched. They, at least, do us the honor to scrap with us, which shows they consider us worthy of much consideration. In all these arguments, it is best to get in the first blow and then you are all right. Only once do I remember feeling perfectly at home in London, and that was the first time I visited Westminster Abbey. I must have been in a prophetic mood or else the atmosphere of so many dead warriors influenced my mind, for the friend who was with me wrote to me in 1917—more than thirty years later, saying: