The first afternoon at sea seems long: every face is strange, and it seems as though in so vast a crowd none will ever become familiar, although one of the miracles of sea-life is the way in which the blurred crowd resolves itself into individual units, each of which has its character and significance. And if we are really to know and understand and not merely to hear with our ears the tale of what happened to the greatest ship in the world, we must first prepare and soak our minds in her atmosphere, and take in imagination that very voyage which began so happily on this April day. At the end of the afternoon came the coast of France, and Cherbourg—a sunset memory of a long breakwater, a distant cliff crowned with a white building, a fussing of tugs and hasty transference of passengers and mails; and finally the lighthouse showing a golden star against the sunset, when the great ship’s head was turned to the red west, and the muffled and murmuring song of the engines was taken up again. Perhaps our traveller, bent upon more discoveries, dined that night not in the saloon, but in the restaurant, and, following the illuminated electric signs that pointed the way along the numerous streets and roads of the ship, found his way aft to the Café-Restaurant; where instead of stewards were French waiters and a _maître d’hotel_ from Paris, and all the perfection of that perfect and expensive service which condescends to give you a meal for something under a five-pound note; where, surrounded by Louis Seize panelling of fawn-coloured walnut, you may on this April evening eat your plovers’ eggs and strawberries, and drink your 1900 Clicquot, and that in perfect oblivion of the surrounding sea. Afterwards, perhaps, a stroll on the deck amid groups of people, not swathed in pea-jackets or oilskins, but attired as though for the opera; and all the time, in an atmosphere golden with light, and musical with low-talking voices and the yearning strains of a waltz, driving five-and-twenty miles an hour westward, with the black night and the sea all about us. And then to bed, not in a bunk in a cabin but in a bedstead in a quiet room with a telephone through which to speak to any one of two thousand people, and a message handed in before you go to sleep that someone wrote in New York since you rose from the dinner-table.