Nearly everyone on board seems nice and willing to be pleasant.  I am on smiling terms with most and speaking terms with many, but one really sees very little of the people outside one’s own little set.  It is odd how people drift together and make cliques.  There are eight in our particular set.  Colonel and Mrs. Crawley, Major and Mrs. Wilmot; Captain Gordon, Mr. Brand, G., and myself.  The Crawleys, the Wilmots, and Captain Gordon are going back after furlough; Mr. Brand and G. and I are going only for pleasure and the cold weather.  Our table is much the merriest in the saloon.  Mrs. Crawley is a fascinating woman; I never tire watching her.  Very pretty, very smart with a pretty wit, she has the most delightfully gay, infectious laugh, which contrasts oddly with her curiously sad, unsmiling eyes, Mrs. Wilmot has a Madonna face.  I don’t mean one of those silly, fat-faced Madonnas one sees in the Louvre and elsewhere, but one’s own idea of the Madonna; the kind of face, as someone puts it, that God must love.

She isn’t pretty and she isn’t in the least smart, but she is just a kind, sweet, wise woman.  Her husband is a cheery soul, very big and boyish and always in uproarious spirits.  Captain Gordon makes a good listener.  Mr. Brand, although he must have left school quite ten years ago, is still very reminiscent of Eton and has a school-boyish taste in silly rhymes and riddles.  Colonel Crawley, a stern and somewhat awe-inspiring man, a distinguished soldier, I am told, hates passionately being asked riddles, and we make him frantic at table repeating Mr. Brand’s witticisms.  He sits with a patient, disgusted face while we repeat,

  “Owen More had run away
  Owin’ more than he could pay;
  Owen More came back one day
  Owin’ more”;

and when he can bear it no longer leaves the table remarking Titbits.  He had his revenge the other day, when the ship was rolling more than a little.  We had ventured to the saloon for tea and were surveying uncertainly some dry toast, when Colonel Crawley came in.  “Ah!” he said, “Steward!  Pork chops for these ladies.”  The mere thought proved the thing too much, we fled to the fresh air—­tealess.

I meant this to be a very long letter, but this pen, faint yet pursuing, shows signs of giving out.  I have to shake it every second word now.

The bugle has gone for lunch, and G. who has been sound asleep for the last hour, is uncoiling herself preparatory to going down.

So good-bye.

S.S.  Scotia, Nov. 1.

...  All day we have glided through the Canal.  Imagine a shining band of silver water, a band of deepest blue sky, and in between a bar of fine gold which is the desert—­and you have some idea of what I am looking at.  Sometimes an Arab passes riding on a camel, and I can’t get away from the feeling that I am a child again looking at a highly coloured Bible picture-book on Sabbath afternoons.