ke a dream from which I might wake
screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a
thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap
with a noise like thunder. And you who sit, amid the _debris_ of the
great wars, you who sit, as it were, upon a battlefield, you know that
war was less terrible than this evil peace; you know that the idle
lads who carried those swords under Francis or Elizabeth, the rude
Squire or Baron who swung that mace about in Picardy or Northumberland
battles, may have been terribly noisy, but were not like us, terribly
quiet."

Whether it was a faint embarrassment of conscience as to the original
source and date of the weapons referred to, or merely an engrained
depression, the guardian of the past looked, if anything, a little
more worried.

"But I do not think," continued Wayne, "that this horrible silence of
modernity will last, though I think for the present it will increase.
What a farce is this modern liberality! Freedom of speech means
practically, in our modern civilisation, that we must only talk about
unimportant things. We must not talk about religion, for that is
illiberal; we must not talk about bread and cheese, for that is
talking shop; we must not talk about death, for that is depressing; we
must not talk about birth, for that is indelicate. It cannot last.
Something must break this strange indifference, this strange dreamy
egoism, this strange loneliness of millions in a crowd. Something must
break it. Why should it not be you and I? Can you do nothing else but
guard relics?"

The shopman wore a gradually clearing expression, which would have led
those unsympathetic with the cause of the Red Lion to think that the
last sentence was the only one to which he had attached any meaning.

"I am rather old to go into a new business," he said, "and I don't
quite know what to be, either."

"Why not," said Wayne, gently having reached the crisis of his
delicate persuasion--"why not be a colonel?"

It was at this point, in all probability, that the interview began to
yield more disappointing results. The man appeared inclined at first
to regard the suggestion of becoming a colonel as outside the sphere
of immediate and relevant discussion. A long exposition of the
inevitable war of independence, coupled with the purchase of a
doubtful sixteenth-century sword for an exaggerated price, seemed to
resettle matters. Wayne left the shop, however, so