But the ship has gathered way, and is sliding along past the Needles, where the little white lighthouse looks so paltry beside the towering cliff. The Channel air is keen, and the bugles are sounding for lunch; and our traveller goes down the staircase, noticing perhaps, as he passes, the great clock with its figures which symbolize Honour and Glory crowning Time. Honour and Glory must have felt just a little restive as, having crowned one o’clock, they looked down from Time upon the throng of people descending the staircase to lunch. There were a few there who had earned, and many who had received, the honour and glory represented by extreme wealth; but the two figures stooping over the clock may have felt that Success crowning Opportunity would have been a symbol more befitting the first-class passengers of the _Titanic_. Perhaps they looked more kindly as one white-haired old man passed beneath—W. T. Stead, that untiring old warrior and fierce campaigner in peaceful causes, who in fields where honour and glory were to be found sought always for the true and not the false. There were many kinds of men there—not every kind, for it is not every man who can pay from fifty to eight hundred guineas for a four days’ journey; but most kinds of men and women who can afford to do that were represented there. Our solitary traveller, going down the winding staircase, does not pause on the first floor, for that leads forward to private apartments, and aft to a writing-room and library; nor on the second or third, for the entrance-halls there lead to state-rooms; but on the fourth floor down he steps out into a reception room extending to the full width of the ship and of almost as great a length. Nothing of the sea’s restrictions or discomforts here! Before him is an Aubusson tapestry, copied from one of the “Chasses de Guise” series of the National Garde-Meuble; and in this wide apartment there is a sense, not of the cramping necessities of the sea, but of all the leisured and spacious life of the land. Through this luxurious emptiness the imposing dignities of the dining-saloon are reached; and here indeed all the insolent splendour of the ship is centred. It was by far the largest room that had ever floated upon the seas, and by far the largest room that had ever moved from one place to another. The seventeenth-century style of Hatfield and Haddon Hall had been translated from the sombreness of oak to the lightness of enamelled white. Artist-plasterers had moulded the lovely Jacobean ceiling, artist-stainers had designed and made the great painted windows through which the bright sea-sunlight was filtered; and when the whole company of three hundred was seated at the tables it seemed not much more than half full, since more than half as many again could find places there without the least crowding. There, amid the strains of gay music and the hum of conversation and the subdued clatter