, full of gratitude, and of a kind of new hope and gladness, very
foreign, one would have said, to my gruesome experiences of the past
forty-eight hours.

England, the old victorious island kingdom, bequeathed to us by Raleigh,
Drake, Nelson; the nineteenth-century England of triumphant
commercialism; England till then inviolate for a thousand years; rich
and powerful beyond all other lands; broken now under the invader's
heel--that ancient England slept.

PART II

THE AWAKENING

Exoriare aliquis de nostris ex ossibus ultor.--VIRGIL.

I

THE FIRST DAYS

The river glideth at his own sweet will.
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

. . . . .

Without Thee, what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blessed barrier between day and day,
Dear Mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!

WORDSWORTH.

It is safe to say that England's exhausted sleep on the night of Black
Saturday marked the end of an era in British history. It was followed by
a curious, quiescent half-consciousness during Sunday. For the greater
part of that day I should suppose that more than half London's populace
continued its sleep.

One of the first things I realized after Monday morning's awakening in
my Bloomsbury lodging was that I must find wages and work speedily,
since I possessed no more than a very few pounds. As a fact, upon that
and several subsequent days I found plenty of work, if nothing
noticeable in the way of wages. I was second in command of one of the
food and labour bureaux which Constance Grey helped to organize, and all
the workers in these bureaux were volunteers.

Another of my first impressions after the crisis was a sense of my
actual remoteness, in normal circumstances, from Constance. Her father
had left Constance a quite sufficient income. Mrs. Van Homrey was in her
own right comfortably well-to-do. But, despite the exiguous nature of my
own resources, it was not the money question which impressed me most in
this connection, but rather the fact that, while my only acquaintances
in London were of a more or less discreditable sort, Constance seemed to
have friends everywhere, and these in almost every case people of
standing and importance. Her army friends were apt to be generals, her
political friends ex-Ministers, her journalistic friends editors, and s