“Oh, Mr. King, this is an excursion.  I assure you the American girl is a serious and practical person most of the time.  You’ve been away so long that your standards are wrong.  She’s not nearly so knowing as she seems to be.”

The boat was preparing to land at Newport News—­a sand bank, with a railway terminus, a big elevator, and a hotel.  The party streamed along in laughing and chatting groups, through the warehouse and over the tracks and the sandy hillocks to the hotel.  On the way they captured a novel conveyance, a cart with an ox harnessed in the shafts, the property of an aged negro, whose white hair and variegated raiment proclaimed him an ancient Virginian, a survival of the war.  The company chartered this establishment, and swarmed upon it till it looked like a Neapolitan ‘calesso’, and the procession might have been mistaken for a harvest-home—­the harvest of beauty and fashion.  The hotel was captured without a struggle on the part of the regular occupants, a dance extemporized in the dining-room, and before the magnitude of the invasion was realized by the garrison, the dancing feet and the laughing girls were away again, and the little boat was leaping along in the Elizabeth River towards the Portsmouth Navy-yard.

It isn’t a model war establishment this Portsmouth yard, but it is a pleasant resort, with its stately barracks and open square and occasional trees.  In nothing does the American woman better show her patriotism than in her desire to inspect naval vessels and understand dry-docks under the guidance of naval officers.  Besides some old war hulks at the station, there were a couple of training-ships getting ready for a cruise, and it made one proud of his country to see the interest shown by our party in everything on board of them, patiently listening to the explanation of the breech-loading guns, diving down into the between-decks, crowded with the schoolboys, where it is impossible for a man to stand upright and difficult to avoid the stain of paint and tar, or swarming in the cabin, eager to know the mode of the officers’ life at sea.  So these are the little places where they sleep? and here is where they dine, and here is a library—­a haphazard case of books in the saloon.

It was in running her eyes over these that a young lady discovered that the novels of Zola were among the nautical works needed in the navigation of a ship of war.

On the return—­and the twenty miles seemed short enough—­lunch was served, and was the occasion of a good deal of hilarity and innocent badinage.  There were those who still sang, and insisted on sipping the heel-taps of the morning gayety; but was King mistaken in supposing that a little seriousness had stolen upon the party—­a serious intention, namely, between one and another couple?  The wind had risen, for one thing, and the little boat was so tossed about by the vigorous waves that the skipper declared it would be imprudent to attempt to land on