This is the month of March. Oh, wouldn’t it be well to wait until the water is warmer? It’s a disquieting sensation to wake up in the night and meditate on whether, say, a week or ten days from now, you may find yourself at the bottom of the Atlantic. In this state of low depression, you decide to live a little longer. And so to-morrow you select a little later date for your sailing. Then the arrival of American mail proves that at least one more boat has run the blockade and escaped the submarines. Yours might. So I take my courage in both hands, and my passport, too, and buy my ticket. When I have done this, a nice, quiet calm possesses me. It is as if I had been a long time dying. Now it is over and finished. I have nothing more to do about it. I pack my trunk just curiously wondering, shall I ever wear this gown again? Or shall I not? Oh, well, it is such a relief to be going away from all this Old World grief. Are the war clouds gathering over New York, too? But I still can see the city all golden in the sunlight beneath the clear blue sky. Last night I was awakened at twelve o’clock by the sounds of a gay supper party’s revelry in some room down my corridor. Which of the staid American gentlemen at this hotel is celebrating? Listen. They are singing, evidently with lifted glasses: “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” Not to the national anthem could my heart thrill more than to Tammany’s own classic refrain. New York! New York! Not all the Kaiser’s submarines can stop me from starting. I may not send word of the steamship or the date of my departure. But I cable my home office: “If I do not succeed in reporting to you myself, apply for the latest information of my movements, to the International Franchise Club, 9 Grafton Street, London.” You see, if I should get the last Long Assignment.... There are only sixteen first class passengers for this trip on the _Carmania_ in her grim grey warpaint. Two of us are women, at whom the rest stare with curious interest. Each of us as we step aboard is handed a lifeboat ticket. Mine reads: “R. M. S. _Carmania_. Name, Mrs. M. P. Daggett, Boat No. 5.” I think I know now how a person feels who is going to his execution. We who walk up this steamship gangway are under sentence of death by the German Government. The old Latin proverb flashes into my mind: “_Morituri te salutamus._” It is we who may be about to die who salute each other here on the _Carmania_ and then we are facing the steel line. Four British officers with swords at their sides and pistols in their belts wait for us in the drawing-room. All the other passengers go easily by but the New York Jewish gentleman with the German name. At last he, too, clears. But the British Government is not yet finished with a journalist. The Tower of London and its damp dark dungeons is again materialising clearly for me.