know also that it may be the ghostly figure of the boatman Charon who will take us silently across the Styx.
Whatever else we may do on this voyage, we shall have to be always going-to-be-drowned. It is a curiously continuously present sensation. I don't know just how many of my fellow travellers go to bed at night with the old nursery prayer in their minds if not on their lips. But I know that for me it is as vivid as when I was four years old:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And should I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Each morning I awake in faint surprise that I am still here in this same seasick world. The daily promenade begins with a tour of inspection to one's personal lifeboat. Everybody does it. You wish to make sure that it has not sprung a leak over night. Then you lean over the steamship's rail to look for the great letters four feet high and electrically illuminated after dark, for all prowling undersea German craft to notice that this is the neutral New Amsterdam of the Holland-American line. Submarine warfare has not yet reached its most savage climax. Somebody says with confident courage: "Now that makes us quite safe, don't you think?" And somebody answers as promptly as expected. "Oh, I'm sure they wouldn't sink us when they see that sign." And no one speaks the thought that's plain in every
