In the first few minutes her giant powers made themselves felt. As she was slowly gathering way she passed the liner _New York_, another ocean monarch, which was lying like a rock moored by seven great hawsers of iron and steel. As the _Titanic_ passed, some mysterious compelling influence of the water displaced by her vast bulk drew the _New York_ towards her; snapped one by one the great steel hawsers and pulled the liner from the quayside as though she had been a cork. Not until she was within fifteen feet of the _Titanic_, when a collision seemed imminent, did the ever-present tugs lay hold of her and haul her back to captivity. Even to the most experienced traveller the first few hours on a new ship are very confusing; in the case of a ship like this, containing the population of a village, they are bewildering. So the eight hours spent by the _Titanic_ in crossing from Southampton to Cherbourg would be spent by most of her passengers in taking their bearings, trying to find their way about and looking into all the wonders of which the voyage made them free. There were luxuries enough in the second class, and comforts enough in the third to make the ship a wonder on that account alone; but it was the first-class passengers, used as they were to all the extravagant luxuries of modern civilized life, on whom the discoveries of that first day of sun and wind in the Channel must have come with the greatest surprise. They had heard the ship described as a floating hotel; but as they began to explore her they must have found that she contained resources of a perfection unattained by any hotel, and luxuries of a kind unknown in palaces. The beauties of French chateaux and of English country-houses of the great period had been dexterously combined with that supreme form of comfort which the modern English and Americans have raised to the dignity of a fine art. Such a palace as a great artist, a great epicure, a great poet and the most spoilt and pampered woman in the world might have conjured up from their imagination in an idle hour was here materialized and set, not in a fixed landscape of park and woodland, but on the dustless road of the sea, with the sunshine of an English April pouring in on every side, and the fresh salt airs of the Channel filling every corner with tonic oxygen. Catalogues of marvels and mere descriptions of wonders are tiresome reading, and produce little effect on the mind; yet if we are to realize the full significance of this story of the _Titanic_, we must begin as her passengers began, with an impression of the lavish luxury and beauty which was the setting of life on board. And we can do no better than follow in imagination the footsteps of one ideal voyager as he must have discovered, piece by piece, the wonders of this floating pleasure house.