The town which served as the base of the American destroyers has but one great street; it is called The Esplanade, and lies along the harbour edge and open to the sea. I saw it first in the wild darkness of a night in early March. Rain, the drenching, Irish rain, had been falling all the day, but toward evening the downpour had ceased, and a blustery south-east wind had thinned the clouds, and brought the harbour water to clashing and complaining in the dark. It was such a night as a man might peer at from a window, and be grateful for the roof which sheltered him, yet up and down the gloomy highway, past the darkened houses and street lamps shaded to mere lifeless lumps of light, there moved a large and orderly crowd. For the most part, this crowd consisted of American sailors from the destroyers in port, lean, wholesome-looking fellows these, with a certain active and eager manner very reassuring to find on this side of our cruelly tried and jaded world. Peering into a little lace shop decked with fragile knickknacks and crammed with bolts of table linen, I saw two great bronzed fellows in pea jackets and pancake hats buying something whose niceties of stitch and texture a little red-cheeked Irish lass explained with pedagogic seriousness; whilst at the other end of the counter a young officer with grey hair fished in his pockets for the purchase money of some yards of lace which the proprietress was slowly winding around a bit of blue cardboard. Back and forth, now swallowed up in the gloom of a dark stretch, now become visible in the light of a shop door, streamed the crowd of sailors, soldiers, officers, country folk and townspeople. I heard Devon drawling its oe's and oa's; America speaking with Yankee crispness, and Ireland mingling in the babel with a mild and genial brogue.