Now and then some particularly sentimental soul would spare a humanitarian thought for the minor horrors of the calamity which had fallen upon Europe and civilization. But his heart would not throb for long when somebody would break in upon his maudlin reflections with a really harrowing tale of trunks left behind in Berlin, Hamburg or Cologne, in Carlsbad, Lucerne or Ostend, at the Gare du Nord in Paris, or the quayside in Boulogne or Calais; or of suit-cases and "innovations" lost, strayed or stolen in the maelstrom of military traffic in Germany, Belgium or France; or of Packards, Peerlesses, Studebakers or Overlands summarily abandoned somewhere in the war zone. What were Europe’s travails to these genuine disasters? It was all right for the war-mad Continent to deck itself in battle-paint if sanguinarily inclined, but ruthlessly and without notice to break up Americans’ traveling plans, knock Cook tours into a cocked hat, interrupt "cures," and on top of that, if you please, actually to play ducks and drakes with the personal effects of free-born American citizens--all because, forsooth, eight or ten million troops required the right of way and insisted upon getting it--that was manifestly the last word in inconsiderateness. Incidentally, of course, it denoted how hopelessly inefficient Europe was, anyway, in the presence of a sudden emergency. Why, the general manager of a cross-town transfer company in New York would have tackled the job without turning a hair. Bah! It served Americans right--quoth a promenade-deck psychologist. Year in and year out they’d been lavishing "good United States dollars" on Europe, and this was her gratitude to her best paying guests. There was no dissent from the view, which prevailed from rudder to bow, that it was the ragged edge of what Bostonians call "the limit." "See America first!" ceasing to be mere admonition, was burnt there and then into the hearts of our baggage-bereft ship’s company with all the force of a fervid national aspiration. "Never again!" was the way my Chicago millionairess deck-chair neighbor, who looted the Rue de la Paix annually, sententiously epitomized not only her aggrieved sentiments, but those of nearly everybody else. All swore a virtuous vow henceforth to practise the stay-at-home habit and for the rest of eternity let man-killing Europe wallow in its savagery. The story of the exodus which the Second Book of Moses records will probably outlive the flight of the children of Columbia across the Atlantic in the summer of 1914. But that hegira will outrank its Egyptian prototype in one gleaming respect--its atmosphere of indomitable good humor, once the Campanians surmounted the initial stage of "grouch," groaning and gnashing of teeth.