All yesterday evening I came upon little knots of sailor men gathered along the quay or at the corners of the streets of Harwich and Dovercourt. Their weather-beaten parchment-brown faces were drawn and troubled, and they spoke in the jerkily lowered voices of men not wont to hold their tongues or passions in restraining leash. There was something in the half-stunned, half-angry looks suggestive of the expressions I had seen on the faces of the sailors at a North Wales port on the evening that a carelessly-framed despatch had tricked them into transient belief that the British Fleet had been beaten by the Germans in the North Sea. But I had been with naval men all afternoon, and knew that there was nothing fresh to report from behind the grey fog-curtain to the north. The trouble was of another kind, but from past experience I knew that the moment when the British sailor man spoke through clenched teeth in those jerkily lowered tones, with his brow corrugated in mahogany wrinkles of perturbation and his blue eyes fixed absently on the fingers of his working hands, was not the one for even the most sympathetically curious to intrude upon him. Enlightenment came later, when I asked the maid who lowered the shutters and drew the double curtains of my room in the little hotel on the Dovercourt cliff, why it was that the children playing in a narrow street that branched off diagonally below my window hushed their voices and tiptoed as they came down toward the seaward end, and why many of even belated and hurrying delivery carts were pulling up and taking another way on their clattering rounds. “Is somebody sick?” I asked, “or is one of the neighbours dead?” “Didn’t you know, sir?” faltered the girl. “That is Captain Fryatt’s ’ome down there. It’s the little red-brick ’ouse--the fourth or fifth from the corner, sir. We all o’ us ’ere knew ’im, sir, an’ loved ’im; an’--you’ll excuse me, sir” (her voice broke for a moment and the starting tears glistened in the flickering light of her candle)--“but I was thinkin’ o’ the missus an’ the nippers. They’s waitin’ down there for more news from Belg’um. I hates to think o’ ’em, sir. It makes me want to scream an’--an’ to fight. I’ll be going now, sir; it gets me all wrought up w’en I talks about it.”