blame--"and then, of course, the New York Evening Post and the
Springfield Republican"--but no general intelligent criticism of ideas
for a popular idol to meet and answer. "On the whole, he's a good
influence--but in place of something better. It isn't good for a man to
stand so long in the bright sunshine."

That it was impossible for the Mexicans to work out their own salvation
he doubted. "I think of Bulgaria--surely our inheritance of Turkish
rule was almost as bad, and of how the nation has responded, and of the
intensive culture we had at a time when we were only a name to most
western Europeans." He was but one of those new potentialities which
every whisper from the now cloud-wrapped Continent seemed to be opening
--this tall, scholar-fighter from the comic-opera land where Mr. Shaw
placed his chocolate soldiers.

In a steamer chair a frail-looking young woman in a white polo coat
looked nervously out on the sea. She was Irish and came of a fighting
line--father, uncles, and brothers in army and navy, her husband in
command of a British cruiser, scouting the very steamship lane through
which we were steaming. Frail-looking, but not frail in spirit--a
fighter born, with Irish keenness and wit, she was ready to prick any
balloon in sight. She had chased about the world too long after a
fighting family to care much about settling down now. They couldn't
afford to keep a place in England and live somewhere else half the time
--"and, after all, what is there in being a cabbage?" She talked little.
"You can learn more about people merely watching them," and she lay in
her steamer chair and watched.

She could tell, merely by looking at them in their civilian's clothes,
which were army and which navy men, which "R.N.s" and which merchant-
service men. We spoke of a young lieutenant from an India artillery
regiment. "Yes--'garrison-gunner,'" she said. She was sorry for the
German people, but the Kaiser was "quite off his rocker and had to be
licked."

War suddenly reached out for us as we came up to Mersey Bar, and an
officer in khaki bellowed from the pilot-boat: "Take down your
wireless!" Down it came, and there the ship stayed for the night, while
the passengers crowded about a volunteer town-crier who read from the
papers that had come aboard, and, in the strange quiet that descends on
an anchored steamship, asked each other how true it was that the German
military bubble--a magazine article with that