mewhat infected with
the melancholy of its owner.

That melancholy was completed at the barber's.

"Shaving, sir?" inquired that artist from inside his shop.

"War!" replied Wayne, standing on the threshold.

"I beg your pardon," said the other, sharply.

"War!" said Wayne, warmly. "But not for anything inconsistent with the
beautiful and the civilised arts. War for beauty. War for society. War
for peace. A great chance is offered you of repelling that slander
which, in defiance of the lives of so many artists, attributes
poltroonery to those who beautify and polish the surface of our lives.
Why should not hairdressers be heroes? Why should not--"

"Now, you get out," said the barber, irascibly. "We don't want any of
your sort here. You get out."

And he came forward with the desperate annoyance of a mild person when
enraged.

Adam Wayne laid his hand for a moment on the sword, then dropped it.

"Notting Hill," he said, "will need her bolder sons;" and he turned
gloomily to the toy-shop.

It was one of those queer little shops so constantly seen in the side
streets of London, which must be called toy-shops only because toys
upon the whole predominate; for the remainder of goods seem to consist
of almost everything else in the world--tobacco, exercise-books,
sweet-stuff, novelettes, halfpenny paper clips, halfpenny pencil
sharpeners, bootlaces, and cheap fireworks. It also sold newspapers,
and a row of dirty-looking posters hung along the front of it.

"I am afraid," said Wayne, as he entered, "that I am not getting on
with these tradesmen as I should. Is it that I have neglected to rise
to the full meaning of their work? Is there some secret buried in each
of these shops which no mere poet can discover?"

He stepped to the counter with a depression which he rapidly conquered
as he addressed the man on the other side of it,--a man of short
stature, and hair prematurely white, and the look of a large baby.

"Sir," said Wayne, "I am going from house to house in this street of
ours, seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens
our city. Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here. For the
toy-shop keeper has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before
the first wars began. You sit here meditating continually upon the
wants of that wonderful time when every staircase leads to the stars,
and every garden-path to the other end of nowhere. Is it
thoughtlessly, do you think, that I st