It is a scene that will live with us for many years.  See, they are running along the platform as the train steams out. 494 they shout, and bravely and with smiling face he calls out in return 494, and off they go, he to the work of his life, and we to the more humdrum but perhaps not less necessary work of the hour.

Chapter III

OLD ENGLAND ON THE SEA

A cheer from the distant crowds, an increased involuntary bustle on board ship, and then train load after train load of troops detrained alongside the ship that was to be their home for the next three weeks.  Up and up the gangways they went in long continuous lines, hour after hour, a procession that seemed as though it would never stop.  At last all are on board, and the bell rings for visitors to go ashore.  The troops crowd the bulwarks of the ship, they climb the rigging, many of them like sailors.  They seize every vantage point from which they can wave a long farewell to those they are leaving behind them, and then some one with a cornet strikes up ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ and ’Rule Britannia,’ and fifteen hundred voices echoed by those on shore join in the patriotic songs.  At last all is ready and the moorings are cast off.  ‘One song more, my lads’; it is ‘Shall auld acquaintance be forgot?’ and there with the good ship already moving from the dock they sing it, while handkerchiefs are vigorously waved and hearty cheers rend the air, and not a few tears are shed.  And so amidst excitement and sorrow, laughter and tears, the good ship drops down the Southampton Water, past Netley Hospital—­soon to receive many of them back—­and Calshott Castle, past the Needles and out into the open Channel, and fifteen hundred fighting men are on their way to South Africa.

=A New Feat in Britain’s History.=

Week after week this was the programme.  It only varied in that the ship was different, and the men were of different regiments and different names.  Until at last the title of this chapter had become an actual fact, and Old England, in a sense truer than ever before, was upon the sea.  For it was not young England simply that was there.  The fathers of our land—­our greatest and our wisest generals, the most seasoned of our veterans, were there also.  And there was hardly a family at home but had some representative, or at any rate some near or dear friend upon the sea.

Never had such a thing as this been attempted before in the history of the world.  Other great expeditions had been fitted out and despatched, for instance, the great Armada which was beaten and dispersed by our Hearts of Oak and broken to pieces upon our Scottish rocks.  But for nearly 150,000 men to be dispatched 7,000 miles by sea, and not a man be lost by shipwreck, is something over which old England may well be proud, and for which it should bow in hearty thanksgiving to God.

The men these ships were carrying were new men.  Some of them certainly were of the old type—­drinking, swearing, impure—­though for three weeks, at any rate, every man of them was perforce a teetotaler, and did not suffer in consequence!  But our army has been recruited in days past from our Sunday Schools with blessed consequences, and on board every ship there were men whose first concern was to find a spot where, with congenial souls, they could meet and pray.