What he knew of them, I suppose, were a few commercial travellers and
small merchants, most likely. But I had observed long before that German
genius has a hypnotising power over half-baked souls and half-lighted
minds. There is an immense force of suggestion in highly organised
mediocrity. Had it not hypnotised half Europe? My man was very much
under the spell of German excellence. On the other hand, his contempt
for France was equally general and unbounded. I tried to advance some
arguments against this position, but I only succeeded in making him
hostile. "I believe you are a Frenchman yourself," he snarled at last,
giving me an intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off
communications with a man of such unsound sympathies.

Hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of
the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their
colouring and texture. Evening was coming on over the North Sea. Black
uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water
and clouds in the Eastern board: tops of islands fringing the German
shore. While I was looking at their antics amongst the waves--and for
all their solidity they were very elusive things in the failing
light--another passenger came out on deck. This one wore a dark overcoat
and a grey cap. The yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed
his chest. His elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of
short white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that it
determined the whole character of his physiognomy. Indeed nothing else
in it had the slightest chance to assert itself. His disposition, unlike
the widower's, appeared to be mild and humane. He offered me the loan of
his glasses. He had a wife and some small children concealed in the
depths of the ship, and he thought they were very well where they were.
His eldest son was about the decks somewhere.