Nothing was ever so scrutinized as the movements of the Boodah during the next two months.

One morning three weeks after her launch three steamers took her in tow, with progress so slow, that at nightfall they were still visible from land; but the next morning had vanished.

Two days later they were met on the Genoa-Leghorn route , six steamers then towing the Boodah , their course S. by W.

Again and again it was met, that funeral of the sea: the prone, tearing steamers, the reluctant bulk. Sometimes a captain's glass might make out a few men lost on the roof like men on a raft, smoking, seated, leaning over a balustrade.

Southward and westward it swam. On the seventh day there arrived at Ajaccio from Marseilles twenty-five bluejackets; and these, in a hired speronare , put to sea, and joined the Boodah twenty miles from the coast.

Thenceforth, a smoke would be seen at a point of the roof, indicating that she, too, was steaming: for it was known that she had a screw and a rudder; and so closely was she observed, that her now added rate could be fixed—two to three knots a day.

She must therefore have some small engines about 4,000 H. P.: and since their motif could only be one thing, resistance to ocean currents, this meant that the Boodah was intended to rest always in one spot: a startling conclusion.

Occasionally a Surveying Service warship would peep above the horizon, watching her.

As she passed through the Straits, seventy-five English blue-jackets put out from Trafalgar, and joined her.

With such reports passed the weeks. Occasionally five or six coal- ships would be seen about the Boodah ; her number of tug-ships might be as low as two; sometimes nine, ten.

At night she made a fine display, and homeward-bound boats from Cape Horn, from Pernambuco, Para, Madeira, spoke highly of her two revolving-drum lighthouses: for these, from opposite corners of the roof, at the rate of a revolution per minute, poured into space two shimmering comets, like Calais and the Eddystone—rapt spinning- dervishes of the sea that hold far converse with the dark, till morning. And between these two ran a festoon of electric lanterns, Japanese and Moorish, cut in ogives; and festoons of coloured moons drooped round the balustrades, so that the blaze and complexity of it presented to ships a spectacle of speckled mystery, fresh to the sea.

After five weeks a hundred and seventeen blue-jackets put out from Portsmouth in a chartered barque and joined her, she still in tow, making now about N. by W.

But by the time this news reached Europe the eyes of Europe were no longer given up to the Boodah : for another Boodah , called the Truth , was a-tow through the North Channel from Belfast; and she had not reached the Mull of Cantire, when a third was launched at San Francisco, so that the interest of the islands became complicated.

What would they do? What could they? Compared with this question, the riddle of the Sphinx was simple, the supposition that they were going to batter coast-walls in the S. Pacific being hardly now tenable. The Boodah finally came to rest some miles North of lat. 50° and East of long. 20°: and there—just on the northern rim of the Gulf Stream where it divides, part toward Ireland, and part toward Africa—she remained, precisely in the middle of the trade- route between Europe and Boston, New York, Halifax: a route covered for fifty miles—twenty-five north, twenty-five south—by her 19.5-inch guns.

It is impossible to describe with how wild a heart, or thrilling a boding, the world heard this thing: eight days later the International Conference of Maritime Nations met at The Hague.

But nothing happened—or the opposite of what was feared: for, as months passed, the Boodah , planted there in the ocean, rapidly became the recognized gathering-point of the fashion and gaiety of Europe, thither flocking the socially ambitious and the "arrived" together, and to have been invited to those revels of taste and elegance became a superiority. Gradually, as the names "Beech", "Ecuador", ceased to be associated with the islands, the name of Hogarth took their place; and Hogarth had engaged Wanda, sweetest of tenors, to a year's stay in the Boodah , whose orchestra was the most cultured anywhere; Roche, her chef , had two years previously been put into a laboratory to devote his soul to the enlargement of his art; and he and that tenor lived in suites of the Boodah such as most princes would consider Utopian.

Hardly anything in her interior suggested the ship : no hammocks for marines, rolling-racks, sick-bay, lockers, steam-tables, wash- rooms, she being just a palace planted in the Atlantic, her bottom going down to a layer of comparative calm, so that hardly ever, in a storm, when the ocean robed her sides in white, washed abroad her slippery plateau, and drenched with spray her lighthouse tops, did the ballroom below know shock or motion. Into her principal hall, far down, circular, one descended by a circle of steps of marble, round which stood a colonnade of Cuban cedar, supporting candelabra and silks; and from atrium-pools sunk in the floor twelve twining fountains brandished spiral sprays, the floor being of a glassy marble, polished with snakestone, suffused with blushes at the coloured silks and at a roof gross with rose and pomegranates, hanging chandeliers; round the raised centre of the floor stood two balustrades, three feet high, hung with silks, the inner circle thirty feet across, higher than the outer, forty-five across: a roseate room, strewn with cushions, colours, flushes; but that raised space was empty: reserved for—a throne.

The throne, still unfinished, had been three years making in India.

And during nine months the élite and joyous yachts arrived, not at the Boodah only, but at others of the twelve which, one by one, were launched and towed to position; and a round of events transacted themselves in the fortresses: Marie Antoinette balls, classic concerts, theatrical functions by troupe or amateur, costume-balls, children's-balls, banquets of the gods, grave receptions. By now there ran right across the Boodah's roof, in the form of a cross, two double colonnades of Doric pillars, at the four ends being Roman arches: and here, some summer afternoon, the passing ship would see a bazaar, all butterfly flutter, feminine hues like flower-beds, cubes of coloured ice, flags, and a buzz of gaiety, and strains of Tzigany music—rainbow-tints of Venice mixed with the levity of the Andrássy Ut of Pesth. Sometimes a fleet of craft would surround the islands. Besides, to each was attached a yacht, and a trawler which continually plied for it between island and land.

At this time Hogarth was deep in debt, and Beech's living upon credit.

So, gradually, a good deal of the awe which the structures had inspired passed off. On the whole, they seemed mere whimsical castles-of-pleasure. The trains of industrious ships grew habituated to their gaudy brightness by night, to their seething reefs, or placid mass, by day. On foggy days the mariner was aware of the islands wailing weird siren-sounds of warning. The islands waved common-code signals of greeting to the passer. Trinity House sent them the usual blanks and instruments for recording meteorological observations. Their positions were marked in British Admiralty Charts, in American Pilot Charts, in "Sailing Directions". The great greyhounds, racing to Sandy Hook, raved with jest past them. The islands began to seem a natural part of the sum of things. There they lay, stable, rooted, trite, familiar; and the question almost arose: "How came it that they were never there before? "—just that object, of that form and colour, seemed so old and natural in that particular spot. So the frogs hopped finally upon the log that God sent them for sovereign.

Meantime, the more thoughtful of men did not fail to observe, and never forgot, that no ship could possibly depart from, or arrive at Europe, without passing within range of some one of the islands' guns. A row of eight lay an irregular crescent (its convexity facing Europe) from just outside the Straits of Gibraltar, where O'Hara admiraled the Mahomet , to the 55th of latitude, where the Goethe lay on the Quebec-Glasgow route : these commanding the European trade with the States and with S. America, as well as with W. and S. Africa, and with Australia by Cape Horn; another in the narrows of the Gulf of Aden, commanding the world's traffic by Suez with the East and with S. Africa; another in the middle of the narrows of the Kattegat, commanding all Baltic trade; another, fifteen miles from San Francisco, and another a hundred and fifty miles from Nagasaki, on the edge of the Black Stream, commanding the Japanese-San Francisco, the Australian-San Francisco trades, and great part of the Japano-Russo-Chinese. These were the principal trades of the world.

Like the despair of Samson awaking manacled and shaven, an occasional shriek would go up from some lone thinker, who perceived that the kingdoms of the world had lapsed into a single hand; and in the privy cabinet the governors drank to the dregs the cup of trembling. But their speech was bold, the matter hung long, the peoples ignored and wrought: there was seed-time and harvest; the newsboy brawled; the long street roared. Far yonder in the darkness and distance of the deep the islands flashed and danced, and were fashionable.

Richard Hogarth held back his hand. ss8D8B7ZhFddzPwErlNAq3kJpYpXs2uHAEvDDETYhdnISopbpUQCdzvdy4qn3OB0