y, "we had been
merely able to recover the lost bags, I believe, with but a touch or
two, I could have remedied the peccant engine. But what with the loss of
plant and the almost insuperable scientific difficulties of the task,
our friends in France are almost ready to desert the chosen medium. They
propose, instead, to break up the drainage system of cities and sweep
off whole populations with the devastating typhoid pestilence: a
tempting and a scientific project: a process, indiscriminate indeed, but
of idyllical simplicity. I recognise its elegance; but, sir, I have
something of the poet in my nature; something, possibly, of the tribune.
And, for my small part, I shall remain devoted to that more emphatic,
more striking, and (if you please) more popular method of the explosive
bomb. Yes," he cried, with unshaken hope, "I will still continue and, I
feel it in my bosom, I shall yet succeed."

"Two things I remark," said Somerset. "The first somewhat staggers me.
Have you, then--in all this course of life, which you have sketched so
vividly--have you not once succeeded?"

"Pardon me," said Zero. "I have had one success. You behold in me the
author of the outrage of Red Lion Court."

"But if I remember right," objected Somerset, "the thing was a _fiasco_.
A scavenger's barrow and some copies of the _Weekly Budget_--these were
the only victims."

"You will pardon me again," returned Zero, with positive asperity: "a
child was injured."

"And that fitly brings me to my second point," said Somerset. "For I
observed you to employ the word 'indiscriminate.' Now, surely, a
scavenger's barrow and a child (if child there were) represent the very
acme and top pin-point of indiscriminate and, pardon me, of ineffectual
reprisal."

"Did I employ the word?" asked Zero. "Well, I will not defend it. But
for efficiency, you touch on graver matters; and before entering upon so
vast a subject, permit me once more to fill our glasses. Disputation is
dry work," he added, with a charming gaiety of manner.

Once more accordingly the pair pledged each other in a stalwart grog;
and Zero, leaning back with an air of some complacency, proceeded more
largely to develop his opinions.

"The indiscriminate?" he began. "War, my dear sir, is indiscriminate.
War spares not the child; it spares not the barrow of the harmless
scavenger. No more," he concluded, beaming, "no more do I. Whatever may
strike fear, whatever may confound or paralyse th