themselves suddenly thrown off their chairs. A furious cyclone arose. Some terrible power tossed the ship like a nutshell. It was carried mercilessly northward, the gale lasting forty-one hours.

A few days later, in the night, the huge silhouettes of icebergs loomed up against the sky, and if the storm had continued one hour more, the ship might have been dashed against the shores of the Sable Islands.

The steamer fairly crawled the rest of the trip, and was battered, though still queen-like, when greeted by anxious crowds in New York.

It was due in eight days; it sailed in after seventeen. Mother always loved travel, but then she felt she had had enough excitement for some time.

A BIT OF TRAVEL

BY OLIVE E. NORTH UP (AGE 14)
(Silver Badge)

THE dawn was just deepening into a rosy sunrise as our little steamer, the ship which was to carry us into the heart of sunny Italy, steamed out into the blue waters of Lake Garda. At last our dreams had come true, and we were in Italy! Behind us, in their wild majestic solitude, the mountains of Austria stood as a barrier between the cold north and the warm southland, and hefore us, veiled in the mists of early morning, lay the country of our dreams.

Gradually, as we progressed southward, the mists disappeared, revealing on one side the dark, rocky sides of the mountains, and on the other, sleeping in the morning sun, hundreds of orange, lemon, and olive groves, with here and there the white marble of a summer villa shining through the foliage.

On, on, on we rode between the shores of an enchanted country, and gradually the stern mountains

A BIT OF TRAVEL

BY HELENKA ADAMOUSKA (AGE 13)

(Gold Badge. Silver Badge won December, 1912) ON a cool, drizzly morning, my mother, then very young, boarded the French liner Gascogne. She traveled alone, under the care of the captain, looking forward to her first crossing with a feeling of delightful anticipation.

One evening, the sky being clear, the water promising and with a glass-like surface, Mother exclaimed to the captain: "Oh, I hope we shall have a real storm!" "I fear you'll be disappointed," answered the captain, pleasantly.

On the third day, around midnight, Mother was suddenly awakened by a great crash. She clung to her bed as the ship lurched to one side, then it rose up and landed with full force on its stern. On deck was a loud clatter. Mother laughed as bells rang for stewardesses and frightened voices asked what had happened. A storm had arisen unexpectedly, and life-boats were torn away by the waves.

The storm continued all night. Next morning, the world seemed to be ending; sometimes enormous, threatening waves like walls leaped over the steamer, again it was thrown up into the air so that the bow was far out of water; occasionally, passengers found

softened to a distant range of purple hills, and the fruit groves slowly gave place to acres and acres of fragrant vineyards, with now and then a field of yellow grain waving in the morning sun.

The breezes wafted to us across the water were heavily laden with the spicy fragrance of crushed grapes fast being made into the famous Italian wine, while now and then a strain of music, dreamy and far-away, would mingle with our thoughts, making us feel that sunny Italy was indeed the "Fairyland of Europe."

A BIT OF TRAVEL

BY ELNYTH ARBUTH NOT (AGE 14)
(Silver Badge)

THREE years ago, we landed at Ceylon on our way to Burma. The bit of travel we proposed to do was from surf-beaten Colombo, with its red earth and longhaired men, to Negombo, a little hili-station above the palm forests.

The railway is narrow and tortuous, winding through unending plantations of the most graceful, full-grown cocoanut-palms, whose monotony is occasionally broken by great swaying clusters of giant bamboos.

Negombo has memories. The Portuguese held it in the eighteenth century, and have left their mark there. A fort which time and the climate have already wellnigh demolished crowns the brow of a hill with a remnant of dignity and sternness. A half-erased inscription records the sway held over the island by men long dead and chased away, now replaced by a bored garrison of

British soldiers in very white barracks. The canal, eighty miles long, which the Portuguese dug two hundred years ago, still remains, and half-naked, wild-looking Cingalese row along it in canoes cut out of the trunks of trees.

There is a brass industry there as well. The furnaces consist of holes in the floor of a tumble-down hut, and the material is cast into them. It is taken out when it is as liquid as water, and poured carefully into primitive molds, whence it comes out as though by magic, fashioned into the most lifelike animals.

When the sun, sinking in a field of blood and gold before vanishing, glowed on a gigantic banyan-tree (whose branches droop like a weeping willow and take root again in the ground, so that ever new trees are springing up), we knew that it was time to go. And so we left the little hill-station, probably never to return again, but taking with us a lasting remembrance of a charming pilgrimage to a strongly fascinating country. Truly, a bit of travel as interesting as it was unusual.