The next morning the scene at Cherbourg was repeated, with the fair green shores of Cork Harbour instead of the cliffs of France for its setting; and then quietly, without fuss, in the early afternoon of Thursday, out round the green point, beyond the headland, and the great ship has steadied on her course and on the long sea-road at last. How worn it is! How seamed and furrowed and printed with the track-lines of journeys innumerable; how changing, and yet how unchanged—the road that leads to Archangel or Sicily, to Ceylon or to the frozen Pole; the old road that leads to the ruined gateways of Phoenicia, of Venice, of Tyre; the new road that leads to new lives and new lands; the dustless road, the long road that all must travel who in body or in spirit would really discover a new world. And travel on it as you may for tens of thousands of miles, you come back to it always with the same sense of expectation, never wholly disappointed; and always with the same certainty that you will find at the turn or corner of the road, either some new thing or the renewal of something old. There is no human experience in which the phenomena of small varieties within one large monotony are so clearly exemplified as in a sea-voyage. The dreary beginnings of docks, of baggage, and soiled harbour water; the quite hopeless confusion of strange faces—faces entirely collective, comprising a mere crowd; the busy highway of the Channel, sunlit or dim with mist or rain, or lighted and bright at night like the main street of a city; the last outpost, the Lizard, with its high gray cliffs, green-roofed, with tiny homesteads perched on the ridge; or Ushant, that tall monitory tower upstanding on the melancholy misty flats; or the solitary Fastnet, lonely, ultimate and watching—these form the familiar overture to the subsequent isolation and vacancy of the long road itself. There are the same day and night of disturbance, the vacant places at table, the prone figures, swathed and motionless in deck-chairs, the morning of brilliant sunshine, when the light that streams into the cabins has a vernal strangeness and wonder for town-dimmed eyes; the gradual emergence of new faces and doubtful staggering back of the demoralized to the blessed freshness of the upper air; the tentative formation of groups and experimental alliances, the rapid disintegration of these and re-formation on entirely new lines; and then that miracle of unending interest and wonder, that the faces that were only the blurred material of a crowd begin one by one to emerge from the background and detach themselves from the mass, to take on identity, individuality, character, till what was a crowd of uninteresting, unidentified humanity becomes a collection of individual persons with whom one’s destinies for the time are strangely and unaccountably bound up; among whom one may have acquaintances, friends, or perhaps enemies; who for the inside of a week are all one’s world of men and women.