coast close on one hand, and sudden death on the other. For all

the space we steamed through that Sunday evening must now be one
great minefield, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while

submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot perhaps where the
insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much fussy

importance. Mines; Submarines. The last word in sea-warfare!
Progress--impressively disclosed by this war.

There have been other wars! Wars not inferior in the greatness of
the stake and in the fierceanimosity of feelings. During that one

which was finished a hundred years ago it happened that while the
English Fleet was keeping watch on Brest, an American, perhaps

Fulton himself, offered to the Maritime Prefect of the port and to
the French Admiral, an invention which would sink all the

unsuspecting English ships one after another--or, at any rate most
of them. The offer was not even taken into consideration; and the

Prefect ends his report to the Minister in Paris with a fine phrase
of indignation: "It is not the sort of death one would deal to

brave men."
And behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the

like proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the
greatness of issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the

manly sentiment of those self-denying words. Mankind has been
demoralised since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances. Its

spirit is apparently so weak now, and its flesh has grown so
strong, that it will face any deadlyhorror of destruction and

cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous
contrivance. It has become the intoxicated slave of its own

detestable ingenuity. It is true, too, that since the Napoleonic
time another sort of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation,

and held out to the world.
IV

On this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a
progress, but a retracing of footsteps on the road of life, I had

no beacons to look for in Germany. I had never lingered in that
land which, on the whole, is so singularly barren of memorable

manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses. An
ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings

to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. Even while yet
very young I turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a

threatening phantom. I believe that children and dogs have, in
their innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral

apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned.
I let myself be carried through Germany as if it were pure space,

without sights, without sounds. No whispers of the war reached my
voluntary abstraction. And perhaps not so very voluntary after

all! Each of us is a fascinatingspectacle to himself, and I had
to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it

were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons. Considering the
condition of humanity, I am, perhaps, not so much to blame for

giving myself up to that occupation. We prize the sensation of our
continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. By watching.

We arrived in Cracow late at night. After a scrambly supper, I
said to my eldest boy, "I can't go to bed. I am going out for a

look round. Coming?"
He was ready enough. For him, all this was part of the interesting

adventure of the whole journey. We stepped out of the portal of
the hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with

moonlight. I was, indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon. I
felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that I could remember

such material things as the right turn to take and the general
direction of the street gave me a moment of wistful surprise.

The street, straight and narrow, ran into the great Market Square
of the town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of

its life. We could see at the far end of the street a promising
widening of space. At the corner an unassuming (but armed)

policeman, wearing ceremoniously at midnight a pair of white gloves
which made his big hands extremelynoticeable, turned his head to

look at the grizzled foreignerholding forth in a strange tongue to
a youth on whose arm he leaned.

The Square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of
moonlight. The garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed

to burn at the bottom of a bluish pool. I noticed with infinite
satisfaction that the unnecessary trees the Municipality insisted

upon sticking between the stones had been steadily refusing to
grow. They were not a bit bigger than the poor victims I could

remember. Also, the paving operations seemed to be exactly at the
same point at which I left them forty years before. There were the

dull, torn-up patches on that bright expanse, the piles of paving
material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on a silvery

sea. Who was it that said that Time works wonders? What an
exploded superstition! As far as these trees and these paving

stones were concerned, it had worked nothing. The suspicion of the
unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses

by our rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably
strengthened within me.

"We are now on the line A.B.," I said to my companion, importantly.
It was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the

Square by the senior students of that town of classical learning
and historical relics. The common citizens knew nothing of it,

and, even if they had, would not have dreamed of taking it
seriously. He who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the

Schools. We youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the
invention of a most excellent fancy. Even as I uttered it to my

boy I experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation.
And then, happening to look up at the wall, I saw in the light of

the corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing
an inscription in raised black letters, thus: "Line A.B."

Heavens! The name had been adopted officially! Any town urchin,
any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any

wandering Boeotian, was free to talk of the line A.B., to walk on
the line A.B., to appoint to meet his friends on the line A.B. It

had become a mere name in a directory. I was stunned by the
extreme mutability of things. Time could work wonders, and no

mistake. A Municipality had stolen an invention of excellent
fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of cast-iron.

I proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using
the profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive

distaste. And this, too, was one of the wonders of Time, for a
bare minute had worked that change. There was at the end of the

line a certain street I wanted to look at, I explained to my
companion.

To our right the unequalmassive towers of St. Mary's Church soared
aloft into the etherealradiance of the air, very black on their

shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the
others. In the distance the Florian Gate, thick and squat under

its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of
the old city wall. In the narrow, brilliantly pale vista of bluish

flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its black archway stood
out small and very distinct.

There was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep
for our ears. Into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness

there issued out of my aroused memory, a small boy of eleven,
wending his way, not very fast, to a preparatory school for day-

pupils on the second floor of the third house down from the Florian
Gate. It was in the winter months of 1868. At eight o'clock of

every morning that God made, sleet or shine, I walked up Florian
Street. But of that, my first school, I remember very little. I

believe that one of my co-sufferers there has become a much
appreciated editor of historical documents. But I didn't suffer

much from the various imperfections of my first school. I was
rather indifferent to school troubles. I had a private gnawing

worm of my own. This was the time of my father's last illness.
Every evening at seven, turning my back on the Florian Gate, I

walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet narrow street a
good distance beyond the Great Square. There, in a large drawing-

room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling,
in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk,

I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the
task of my preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a tall

white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar