ime; I remember the day of wrath and mourning when the little red
flag had to be taken away from Plevna--like other maturer judges, I was
backing the wrong horse, at any rate the losing horse. And now to-day we
are putting little pin-flags again into maps of the Balkan region, and
the passions are being turned loose once more in their playground."

"The war will be localised," said the Merchant vaguely; "at least every
one hopes so."

"It couldn't wish for a better locality," said the Wanderer; "there is a
charm about those countries that you find nowhere else in Europe, the
charm of uncertainty and landslide, and the little dramatic happenings
that make all the difference between the ordinary and the desirable."

"Life is held very cheap in those parts," said the Merchant.

"To a certain extent, yes," said the Wanderer. "I remember a man at
Sofia who used to teach me Bulgarian in a rather inefficient manner,
interspersed with a lot of quite wearisome gossip. I never knew what his
personal history was, but that was only because I didn't listen; he told
it to me many times. After I left Bulgaria he used to send me Sofia
newspapers from time to time. I felt that he would be rather tiresome if
I ever went there again. And then I heard afterwards that some men came
in one day from Heaven knows where, just as things do happen in the
Balkans, and murdered him in the open street, and went away as quietly as
they had come. You will not understand it, but to me there was something
rather piquant in the idea of such a thing happening to such a man; after
his dullness and his long-winded small-talk it seemed a sort of brilliant
_esprit d'esalier_ on his part to meet with an end of such ruthlessly
planned and executed violence."

The Merchant shook his head; the piquancy of the incident was not within
striking distance of his comprehension.

"I should have been shocked at hearing such a thing about any one I had
known," he said.

"The present war," continued his companion, without stopping to discuss
two hopelessly divergent points of view, "may be the beginning of the end
of much that has hitherto survived the resistless creeping-in of
civilisation. If the Balkan lands are to be finally parcelled out
between the competing Christian Kingdoms and the haphazard rule of the
Turk banished to beyond the Sea of Marmora, the old order, or disorder if
you like, will have received its death-blow. Something of its spirit
will