Page:Waylaid by Wireless - Balmer - 1909.djvu/269

Rh letting this opportunity for excitement die from inanition. Many of the women are truly frightened; but most of you men, I believe, are actually glad."

"Yes," Preston confessed. "We are. I dropped in the smoking-room on the way here and was greeted really with cheers, and—as you said—even from the English. Truly, I believe that though it scares some of the women, this is going to save the lives of no mean number of our British cousins.

"We have an unusually large number of the regular 'globe-trotters' aboard this trip who are always game and on the lookout for anything in the way of a novelty, or a sporting proposition. Yesterday and last night I really feared that half of them were going to die on the decks from virulent ennui. Between yawns, they bought numbers in the pools, of course, in a hopeless, somnambulistic sort of way; but they had no interest in winning just a little more money. Dear old Dunneston himself was bad enough. Of 243