So, knowing all this so well, I watched the boat train crowds with the keenest enjoyment the other morning. There were girls who would be tumbling about in the snow before many days were gone, or sitting in the palish summer of the Riviera in white, pleated skirts. There went the hardened traveller with the well-worn rucksacks and the skis, the excited, flushed traveller making a first journey, and--lucky fellow--a man with a white pith helmet over his arm. Nothing is more awkward to pack than a pith helmet. Even socks and shaving tackle will not sit comfortably in it. When carried with an air it advertises the fact that you are not a mere Swiss fan or a poor Riviera lizard, but an honest-to-goodness traveller, possibly even an explorer. In the Channel boat people will look at you as you bear this symbol of the sun on your arm. You will stand out above all others. Perhaps in the bar some one will say: "Going far?" and you can flick the ash of your cigarette carelessly and say: "No; only to Timbuctoo!" A great thing is a sun helmet! Then there was the lady of quality off to Monte Carlo, with trunks full of dresses, and one trunk lightly packed to contain more dresses which she will accumulate in Paris. There was a pale woman who had obviously been ordered South. Her husband stood beside the Pullman door telling her to take great care of herself and get well, and just before the train left he shyly, like a boy, gave her a little packet in white tissue paper, which she opened, and the tears came into her eyes as she held the small jeweller's box in her hand. Yes; there are such husbands! All the time the cosy lamplit tables of the Pullman cars gradually filled. At one a man turned to the weather report, where under a weird map of barometric pressure he would read about the Channel crossing; at another a woman gazed thoughtfully through the menu wondering if it would be wise to eat a grilled sole. * * * Sharp to the last second of the minute the Continental boat express slipped out of Victoria with its load of people in search of health and pleasure. A flutter of handkerchiefs, a turn away, and the tail coach disappeared with those squat mail boxes on it which are lifted by a crane into the hold of the ship and lifted out in France, fixed on a railway wagon, and consigned to the G.P.O. in Paris. As the boat express went off the diminishing grind of its wheels seemed to sing to me of olive yards and orange groves and long white roads in sunlight, and, somewhere far down in the south, a ship.... Romantic Mutton Suppose you were walking down that delicious slope of Piccadilly, the Green Park rails on your left, and suddenly you saw Sir Claude, the wicked young squire, chucking a shepherdess under the chin while he slapped his riding boots with a hunting crop. Suppose...