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about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation.  “Hurrah,” he cried under his breath.  “The first German light!  Hurrah!”
    And those two American citizens shook hands on it with the greatest fervour, while I turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant wink of the Borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness.  The shade of the night had settled on the North Sea.
    I do not think I have ever seen before a night so full of lights.  The great change of sea life since my time was brought home to me.  I had been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers.  They went on and on as if in chase of each other, the Baltic trade, the trade of Scandinavia, of Denmark, of Germany, pitching heavily into a head sea and bound for the gateway of Dover Straits.  Singly, and in small companies of two and three, they emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances ahead as if the supply of rather roughly finished mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away there, below the grey curve of the earth.  Cargo steam vessels have reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one.  These dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous.  Their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.
    When they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo tanks carried tame lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here, there, and everywhere, as of some High Street, broken up and washed out to sea.  Later, Heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the clouds.
    I remained on deck until we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so overlighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape, glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board.  I fear that the oar, as a working implement, will become presently as obsolete as the sail.  The pilot boarded us in a motor-dinghy.  More and more is mankind reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little wheels.  Progress!  Yet the older methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits.  And readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles made a more complete man.
    It was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran to and fro like a water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance.  Within hail of us the hull of the Elbe lightship floated all dark and silent under its enormous round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow watching the broad estuary full of lights.
    Such was my first view of the Elbe approached under the wings of peace ready for flight away from the luckless shores of Europe.  Our visual impressions remain with us so persistently that I find it extremely difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark over there, that the Elbe lightship has been towed away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of Heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat laid up, or turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to do.  And obviously it must be so.
    Any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping along cautiously with the unlighted, war-blighted black coast close on one hand, and sudden death on the other.  For all the space we steamed through that Sunday evening must now be one great minefield, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot perhaps where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much fussy importance.  Mines; Submarines.  The last word in sea-warfare!  Progress — impressively disclosed by this war.
    There have been other wars!  Wars not inferior in the greatness of the stake and in the fierce animosity of feelings.  During that one which was finished a hundred years ago it happened that while the English Fleet was keeping watch on Brest, an