It was strange to leave this place of shadows and silences and hour-long dreams to play a humble part in a noisy, gas-lit world that had not known these wonders; but there were consolations. Elder brothers might prevail in argument by methods that seemed unfair, but, beneath a baffled exterior, we could conceal a sublime pity for their unadventurous lives. Governesses might criticise our dusty clothes with wearisome eloquence, but the recollection that women were not allowed on board the _Black Margaret_ helped us to remain conventionally polite. Like the gentleman in Mr. Wells’s story, we knew that there were better dreams, and the knowledge raised us for a while above the trivial passions of our environment. We were not the only children who had found the mouse-cupboard a place of enchantment, for when we explored it first we discovered a handful of wooden beads carefully hidden in a cranny in the wall. These breathed of the nursery rather than of the schoolroom, and yet, perhaps, those forgotten children had known what we knew, and our songs of the sea stirred only familiar echoes. It is likely enough that to-day other children have inherited our dreams, and that other hands steer the _Black Margaret_ under approving stars. If this indeed be so, they are in our debt, for in one of our hiding-places we left the “Count of Monte Cristo” in English, rare treasure-trove for any proper boy. If this should ever meet his eyes he will understand. A RAILWAY JOURNEY I SUPPOSE that when little boys made their journeys by coach with David Copperfield or Tom Brown and his pea-shooting comrades they did in truth find adventure easier to achieve than we who were born in an age of railways. But though the rarer joys of far travel by road were denied us, it did not need Mr. Rudyard Kipling in a didactic mood to convince us that there was plenty of romance in railway journeys if you approached them in the right spirit. We were as fond of playing at trains as most small boys, and a stationary engine with the light of the furnace glowing on the grim face of the driver was a disquieting feature of all my nightmares. So when the grown-up people announced that one of us was to make a long journey young Ulysses became for the moment an envied and enchanted figure. Our periodical excursions to London were well enough in their way; noisy, jolly parties in reserved carriages to pantomimes and the Lord Mayor’s Show, or matter-of-fact visits to the dentist or the shops. But we all knew the features of the landscape on the way to London by heart, and it was the thought of voyaging through the unknown that fired our lively blood, our hazy sense of geography enabling us to believe that all manner of marvels were to be seen by young eyes from English railway-carriages. Also we did not feel that we were real travellers until we had left all our own grown-ups behind, though in such circumstances we had to put up with the indignity of being confided to