table people
whom God ever had the ill-judgment to create.

* * * * *

I was born in Trieste, and lived there with my parents until I was
eight years old. In our private life we always spoke Italian or
French, German was our official language. I know that language well,
of course, but it is not my mother tongue. Italian or French, and
afterwards English--I speak and write all three equally well; which of
the three I shall use when I come to die and one reverts to the speech
of the nursery and schoolroom, I cannot say; it will depend upon whom
those are that stand about my deathbed.

When I was eight years old, my father, Captain ---- (no, I will not
tell you my name; it is not Trehayne though somewhat similar in
sound), was appointed Austrian Consul at Plymouth, and we all moved to
that great Devonshire seaport. I was young enough to absorb the rich
English atmosphere, nowhere so rich as in that county which is the
home and breeding-ground of your most splendid Navy. I was born again,
a young Elizabethan Englishman. My story to you of my origin was true
in one particular--I really was educated at Blundell's School at
Tiverton. Whenever--and it has happened more than once--I have met as
Trehayne old schoolfellows of Blundell's they have accepted without
comment or inquiry my tale that I had become an Englishman, and had
anglicised my name. Among the peoples which exist on earth to-day, you
English are the most nobly generous and unsuspicious. The Prussians
laugh at you; I, an Austrian-Italian, love and respect you.

* * * * *

When I was sixteen, after I had spent eight years in Devon, and four
of those years at an English public school, I was in speech and almost
in the inner fibres of my mind an Englishman. Your naval authorities
at Plymouth and Devonport, as serenely trustful and heedless of
espionage as the mass of your kindly people, allowed my father--whom I
often accompanied--to see the dockyards, the engine shops, the
training schools, and the barracks. They knew that he was an Austrian
naval officer, and they took him to their hearts as a brother, of the
common universal brotherhood of the sea. I think that your Navy holds
those of a foreign naval service as more nearly of kin to themselves
than civilians of their own blood. The bond of a common profession is
more close than the bond of a common nationality. I do not doubt that
my father sent mu