ANOTHER TURN OF THE SCREW AND HE WOULD BREAK DOWN 176 UNDRESSING IN THE BERTH OF AN AMERICAN CAR IS AN ACROBATIC FEAT 184 THEIR WHOLE BUSINESS IS TO STEAL OTHER PEOPLE’S BAGGAGE 188 TRYING TO GET A NUMBER AT THE HOTEL CECIL 192 ROUND THE WORLD IN ANY NUMBER OF DAYS I believe there is a school of people who say the world is flat. I asked H. G. Wells (who ought to know) whether the world was flat: He said he thought it improbable (mark the scepticism of H. G. Wells!), but he said the proofs generally given of the world’s roundness were bosh. The dogmas of science go round and round, from reaction to progress, and from progress to reaction, like the dogmas of medicine. One has only to remain very conservative to find one’s self a revolutionary. “But,” some one may say, “whether the world is round and you are going round it, or whether it is flat and you are going across (or along?) it, that is no reason for describing your voyage--nowadays a hackneyed affair; you might just as well describe a journey round the Place de la Concorde or Trafalgar Square.” My answer to this is, I might. But all journeys differ with the differing traveler. I write partly to please myself, partly in the hope of pleasing others, and partly in the hope (a pious hope) of gain. _Tilbury: June 21_ There is a dock-strike going on: but the leaders say this has been defeated; the newspapers say it is over. I reach Tilbury Docks by noon of Friday, June 21. There, evidences of a strike are manifest in the shape of a local body of special police. The porter who wheels my luggage points them out and alludes to them in vivid and disrespectful terms. He says they are a pack of--you know the rest. I am sailing in one of the Orient ships: one of the big ones, twelve thousand tons or so. As soon as I get on board the lift-boy assures me that there are only eight old hands on board--all the rest have struck. “But who are the new hands?” I ask. “Casual amateurs?” “Oh! just any one we would get,” he says. It turns out that five hundred members of the police have been on board the ship for a week. Coaling has been carried out with the utmost difficulty. Most of the new stewards have never been to sea. Nobody knows where anything is. The steward in the smoking-room doesn’t know where the materials for liquid refreshment are concealed. “But will they be found before the end of the voyage?” I hear a man inquire in some trepidation. The steward says they will. There is a sigh of relief, and soon we are steaming down the Thames. I shall be in the ship till we reach Australia. My ticket is for New Zealand. There is a sense of delicious independence and freedom from the fretting ties of everyday life when one starts on a long journey in a big liner. And, watching the lights of Brighton flashing in the night, I murmur to myself the words of the hymn:--