And now! Thirty years after, I have no more to do with it than any of my fellow passengers in this ship. The place is there, the place is the same, but I am divorced from it. There it is, in sight and almost within reach, but I no longer belong to it. It is far away, a part of the past, a part of the irrevocable, a fugitive facet in a kaleidoscope of memories and dreams. * * * * * If the world of romance be divided into provinces, each having its capital, Plymouth is certainly the capital of that region in the romantic world of England which concerns the sea. And the last twenty years, which have made such fearful havoc among so much which was characteristically English, have spared Plymouth. Plymouth still smiles over the Sound--between the luxuriant wooded hills of Mount Edgecombe and the forts of Statton Heights, crowned in the distance by the blue rim of Dartmoor. Little cutters, with their spotless sails, are racing in the Sound; two torpedo destroyers are dressed because it is Coronation Day; a German liner has arrived from New York. Everything is just the same as it used to be thirty years ago. Just before sunset a real Devonshire shower comes on, veiling the hills in a gray mist, but the sun, only half hidden, silvers the waters. Then the rain drifts away, and the sun sets in a watery glory of gold and silver, and as the twilight deepens, threatening and cloudy, all the lights begin to twinkle on the Hoe. There are always a lot of lights in Plymouth, but there are more than usual to-night, because the city is illuminated. We steam past the breakwater. The Eddystone Light appears and vanishes intermittently far ahead, and behind us Plymouth is twinkling and gleaming and flashing. “Yarnder lumes the Island, yarnder lie the ships, Wi’ sailor lads a-dancin’ heel-an’-toe, An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’, He sees it arl so plainly, as he saw it long ago.” These lines of Newbolt’s, from his poem, “Drake’s Drum,” ring in my memory and seem now and to-night intolerably appropriate. It begins to drizzle once more, and I feel the well-known smell of the West Country rain all about me, and the years slip by, and the past rises from its tomb, sharp and vivid as the present.... I see it all so plainly as I saw it long ago. All at once forward in the steerage, a party of Welsh emigrants start singing a wailing Celtic chorus, piercingly melancholy, alien and strange, and this chases away the dream, and reminds me that I am on a liner bound for Australia, and that it’s raining, and I determine to seek the smoking-room. _Bay of Biscay: June 24_ Somebody ought to start a series called “Books by Bores for People who Really Want to Know.”