the band; here comes a sailor." And ever and anon, a breeze blows in from the harbour bringing with it a faint smell from the funnels of the oil-burning destroyers, a smell which suggests that a giant oil lamp somewhere in the distance has need of turning down. After the lull of noon, the men to whom liberty has been given begin to arrive in boatloads forty and fifty strong. The patrollers, distinguished from their fellows by leggins, belts, white hats, and police billie, descend first, form in line, and march off to their ungrateful task of keeping order where there is no disorder; then, scrambling up the water side stairs like youngsters out of school, follow the liberty men. If there is any newcomer to the fleet among them, it is an even chance that he will be rushed over the hill to the _Lusitania_ cemetery, a gruesome pilgrimage to which both British and American tars are horridly partial. Some are sure to stroll off to their club, some elect to wander about the Esplanade, others disappear in the highways and byways of the town. For Bill and Joe have made friends. There have been some fifty marriages at this base. I imagine a good deal of match-making goes on in those grimy streets, for the Irish marriage is, like the Continental one, no matter of silly sentiment, but a serious domestic transaction. All afternoon long, the sailors come and go. The supper hour takes them to their club; night divides them between the movies and the nightly promenade in the gloom. The glories of this base as a mercantile port, if there ever were any--and the Queenstown folk labour mightily to give you the impression that it was the only serious rival to London--are now over with the glories of Nineveh and Tyre. A few Cunard lithographs of leviathans now for the most part at the bottom of the sea, a few dusty show cases full of souvenirs, pigs and pipes of black, bog oak, "Beleek" china, a fragile, and vanilla candy kind of ware, and lace 'kerchiefs "made by the nuns" alone remain to recall the tourist traffic that once centred here. To-day, one is apt to find among the souvenirs an incongruous box of our most "breathy" (forgive my new-born adjective) variety of American chewing gum. If you would imagine our base as it was in the great days, better forget the port entirely and try to think of a great British and American naval base crammed with shipping flying the national ensigns, of waters thrashed by the propellers of oil tankers, destroyers, cruisers, armed sloops, mine layers, and submarines even. A busy dockyard clangs away from morning till night; a ferry boat with a whistle like the frightened scream of a giant's child runs back and forth from the docks to the Admiralty pier, little parti-coloured motor dories run swiftly from one destroyer to another.