“Here, lass!” he said.  “This’ll be safer with you than with me.”

She was flattered.

When it came in, the Liverpool train was crammed to the doors.  And two hundred people pumped themselves into it, as air is forced into a pneumatic tyre.  The entire world seemed to be going to Liverpool.  It was uncomfortable, but it was magnificent.  It was joy, it was life.  The chimneys and kilns of the Five Towns were far away.  And Annie, though in a cold perspiration lest she might never see her tin trunk again, was feverishly happy.  At Liverpool William Henry demanded silver coins from her.  She had a glimpse of her trunk.  Then they rattled and jolted and whizzed in an omnibus to Prince’s Landing Stage.  And William Henry demanded more coins from her.  A great ship awaited them.  Need it be said that Douglas was their destination?  The deck of the great ship was like a market-place.  Annie had never seen such a thing.  They climbed up into the market-place among the shouting, gesticulating crowd.  There was a real shop, at which William Henry commanded her to buy a hat-guard.  The hat-guard cost sixpence.  At home sixpence was sixpence, and would buy seven pounds of fine mealy potatoes; but here sixpence was nothing—­certainly it was not more than a halfpenny.  They wandered and found other shops.  Annie could not believe that all those solid shops and the whole market-place could move.  And she was not surprised, a little later, to see Prince’s Landing Stage sliding away from the ship, instead of the ship sliding away from Prince’s Landing Stage.  Then they went underground, beneath the market-place, and Annie found marble halls, colossal staircases, bookshops, trinket shops, highly-decorated restaurants, glittering bars, and cushioned drawing-rooms.  They had the most exciting meal in the restaurant that Annie had ever had; also the most expensive; the price of it indeed staggered her; still, William Henry did not appear to mind that one meal should exceed the cost of two days living in Birches Street.  Then they went up into the market-place again, and lo! the market-place had somehow of itself got into the middle of the sea!

Before the end of the voyage they had tea at threepence a cup.  Annie reflected that the best “Home and Colonial” tea cost eighteenpence a pound, and that a pound would make two hundred and twenty cups.  Similarly with the bread and butter which they ate, and the jam!  But it was glorious.  Not the jam (which Annie could have bettered), but life!  Particularly as the sea was smooth!  Presently she descried a piece of chalk sticking up against the horizon, and it was Douglas lighthouse.

III