JOSEPH CONRAD
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 that they were very well where they were. His eldest son was about the decks somewhere.
“We are Americans,” he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar tone. He spoke English with the accent of our captain's “wonderful people,” and proceeded to give me the history of the family's crossing the Atlantic in a White Star ship. They remained in England just the time necessary for a railway journey from Liverpool to Harwich. His people (those in the depths of the ship, I suppose) were naturally a little tired.
At that moment a young man of 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 Strait. Singly, and in small companies of two or 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 this 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
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