The first thing we heard when we reached Marseilles was the welcome news that the tide of war had turned, and Mafeking was relieved.
Our company in the saloon was about half French and half English and Australian, and a more friendly crowd it would have been difficult to find afloat. We had had the usual concert the night before, and wound up with the Marseillaise and God Save the Queen, and when we set up the champagne for the last time in the smoking-room and drank to B.P. and his merry men, the only man who declined to join in was, I regret to say, an Irishman. He was as jolly a _compagnon de voyage_ and as good-hearted a man as you would wish to meet in a ten-thousand-mile trip; but on that particular subject he was a trifle eccentric.
When I left the _Australien_ I looked upon Yellow Jack, as I hope, for the last time, for it ever a man was heart-sick of the sight of a piece of bunting I was of that miserable little yellow oblong.
The next morning we took our places in the P.L.M. _Rapide_ and went whirling away over the pleasant lands of Southern France, through Lyons, Dijon, and Maçon, to Paris and thence to Calais in trains that were well worthy to run over the same metals as the “South Western Limited,” and the “Overland.”
Then came the usual bucketing across the Channel, and after that a crawl of seventy-six miles in two hours and thirty-five minutes in a dirty, rickety, first-class compartment on one of the alleged expresses of the Amalgamated Crawlers. The splendid corridor train of the Nord had covered the hundred and eighty-five miles between Paris and Calais inside four hours; but that was in France. Still the “boat-express” did at last manage to struggle into Charing Cross, and I found myself standing in the familiar Strand once more. The thirty-thousand-mile trip was finished, and Prisonland with all its new experiences and varied memories was itself now only a memory.
[1] Since my return, I find that there has been a recrudescence of this fiscal foolishness in New York with an addition of personal persecution. By the time these pages are in my readers’ hands the autocrats of the inquisition will probably have heard something drop. To bully the American Woman is too large an order even for the Great Republic.