, and
I could hear his clean-cut words distinctly. He had a good incisive
delivery. Across his words now the hoarse yell of an approaching
newsboy smote upon my ears:

"Extry speshul! Sixpence! German Army Corps in England! Speshul!
Invashen er Sufferk! Speshul--sixpence! German Army Corps--sixpence!
Invashen!"

"By Jove!" I thought. "That's rough on our disarmament feature from Herr
Mitmann!"

I very well remember that that precisely was my thought.

XIV

THE NEWS

He could not hear Death's rattle at the door,
He was so busy with his sottishness.

TURNER.

The chance of my position on the edge of the crowd nearest to Marble
Arch caused me to be among those who secured a paper, and at the
comparatively modest price of sixpence. Two minutes later, I saw a
member of the committee of the Demonstration hand over half-a-crown for
one of the same limp sheets, all warm and smeary from the press. And in
two more minutes the newsboys (there must have been fifty of them) were
racing back to Marble Arch, feverishly questing further supplies, and, I
suppose, reckoning as they ran their unaccustomed gains.

The news, mostly in poster type, was only a matter of a few lines of
comment, and a few more lines of telegraphic despatch from Brentwood:

"Telegraphic communication with Chelmsford has now been cut off, but one
of our special representatives, who succeeded in obtaining a powerful
six-cylinder motor-car, has reached Brentwood, after a racing tour to
the northeastward. We publish his despatch under all possible reserve.
He is a journalist of high repute, but we venture to say with
confidence that he has evidently been imposed upon by the promoters of
the most abominably wicked hoax and fraud ever perpetrated by criminal
fanatics upon a trusting public. We have very little doubt that a number
of these rabid advocates of that spirit of militarism to which the
British public will never for one moment submit, will be cooling their
heated brains in prison cells before the night is out."

And then followed the despatch from Brentwood, which said:

"Roads, railways, communication of all kinds absolutely blocked. Coastal
regions of Suffolk and South Norfolk, and possibly Essex, are occupied
by German soldiers. A cyclist from near Harwich says the landing was
effected last evening, the most elaborate preparations and arrangements
having been made beforehand. My