e, self-
important scale, sat in his favoured cafe in the world-wise Habsburg
capital, confronted with the _Neue Freie Presse_ and the cup of cream-
topped coffee and attendant glass of water that a sleek-headed piccolo
had just brought him. For years longer than a dog's lifetime
sleek-headed piccolos had placed the _Neue Freie Presse_ and a cup of
cream-topped coffee on his table; for years he had sat at the same spot,
under the dust-coated, stuffed eagle, that had once been a living,
soaring bird on the Styrian mountains, and was now made monstrous and
symbolical with a second head grafted on to its neck and a gilt crown
planted on either dusty skull. To-day Luitpold Wolkenstein read no more
than the first article in his paper, but read it again and again.

"The Turkish fortress of Kirk Kilisseh has fallen . . . The Serbs, it is
officially announced, have taken Kumanovo . . . The fortress of Kirk
Kilisseh lost, Kumanovo taken by the Serbs, these are tiding for
Constantinople resembling something out of Shakspeare's tragedies of the
kings . . . The neighbourhood of Adrianople and the Eastern region,
where the great battle is now in progress, will not reveal merely the
future of Turkey, but also what position and what influence the Balkan
States are to have in the world."

For years longer than a dog's lifetime Luitpold Wolkenstein had disposed
of the pretensions and strivings of the Balkan States over the cup of
cream-topped coffee that sleek-headed piccolos had brought him. Never
travelling further eastward than the horse-fair at Temesvar, never
inviting personal risk in an encounter with anything more potentially
desperate than a hare or partridge, he had constituted himself the
critical appraiser and arbiter of the military and national prowess of
the small countries that fringed the Dual Monarchy on its Danube border.
And his judgment had been one of unsparing contempt for small-scale
efforts, of unquestioning respect for the big battalions and full purses.
Over the whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled
histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words "the Great
Powers"--even more imposing in their Teutonic rendering, "Die
Grossmachte."

Worshipping power and force and money-mastery as an elderly nerve-ridden
woman might worship youthful physical energy, the comfortable,
plump-bodied cafe-oracle had jested and gibed at the ambitions of the
Balkan kinglets and their peoples, had unl