which we were steaming. Frail-looking, but not frail in spirit--a
fighter born, with Irish keenness and wit, she was ready to prick any
balloon in sight. She had chased about the world too long after a
fighting family to care much about settling down now. They couldn't
afford to keep a place in England and live somewhere else half the time
--"and, after all, what is there in being a cabbage?" She talked little.
"You can learn more about people merely watching them," and she lay in
her steamer chair and watched.

She could tell, merely by looking at them in their civilian's clothes,
which were army and which navy men, which "R.N.s" and which merchant-
service men. We spoke of a young lieutenant from an India artillery
regiment. "Yes--'garrison-gunner,'" she said. She was sorry for the
German people, but the Kaiser was "quite off his rocker and had to be
licked."

War suddenly reached out for us as we came up to Mersey Bar, and an
officer in khaki bellowed from the pilot-boat: "Take down your
wireless!" Down it came, and there the ship stayed for the night, while
the passengers crowded about a volunteer town-crier who read from the
papers that had come aboard, and, in the strange quiet that descends on
an anchored steamship, asked each other how true it was that the German
military bubble--a magazine article with that title had been much read
on the way over--had burst.

Slowly next morning we crept up the Mersey, past a rusty tramp outward
bound, crowded with khaki-clad men. All the shipping was tooting as she
swept by, and the men cheering and waving their hats at the land they
might never come back to. The regular landing-stages were taken by
transports, tracks were held for troop-trains, and it was night before