When William Came by Saki

Chapter one of When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came By Saki, Chapter one, The Singing Bird and the Barometer Cicily Yoville sat in a low swing chair, alternately looking at herself in a mirror and at the other occupant of the room in the flesh. Both prospects gave her undisguised

satisfaction without being vain. She was duly appreciative of good looks, whether in herself or in another, and the reflection that she saw in the mirror and the young man whom she saw seated at the piano, would have come with credit out of a more severe critical inspection. Probably she looked longer and with

greater appreciation at the piano player than at her own image. Her good looks were an inherited possession that had been with her more or less all her life, while Ronnie Stare was a comparatively new acquisition, discovered and achieved, so to speak, by her own enterprise, selected by her own good taste. Fate had given her adorable eyelashes and an excellent profile. Ronnie was an indulgence

she had bestowed on herself. Cicily had long ago planned out for herself a complete philosophy of life, and had resolutely set to work to carry her philosophy into practice. When love is over, how little of love even the lover understands, She quoted to herself from one of her favorite poets, and transposed the saying into while life is with us, how little of life even the materialist understands. Most people that she knew took endless pines and precautions to preserve

and prolong their lives and keep their powers of enjoyment unimpaired. Few, very few seemed to make any intelligent effort at understanding what they really wanted in the way of enjoying their lives, or to ascertain what were the best means for satisfying those wants. Fewer still bent their whole energies to the one paramount aim of getting what they wanted in the fullest possible measure. Her scheme of life was not a wholly selfish one. No one could understand what she wanted as

well as she did herself. Therefore, she felt that she was the best person to pursue her own ends and cater for her own wants. To have others thinking and acting for one merely meant that one had to be perpetually grateful for a lot of well meant and usually unsatisfactory services. It was like the case of a rich man giving a community a free library, when probably the

community only wanted free fishing or reduced tram fares. Cicily studied her own wis and wishes, experimented in the best method of carrying them into effect, compared the accumulated results of her experiments, and gradually arrived at a very clear idea of what she wanted in life and how best to achieve it. She was, not, by disposition, a self centered soul. Therefore, she did not make the mistake of supposing that one can live successfully and gracefully in a

crowded world without taking due notice of other human elements around one. She was instinctively far more thoughtful for others than many a person who is genuinely but unseeingly addicted to unselfishness. Also, she kept in her armory the weapon which can be so mightily effective if used sparingly by a really sincere individual. The knowledge of when to be a humbug. Ambition entered to a certain extent into her

life and governed it, perhaps rather more than she knew. She desired to escape from the doom of being an an entity, but the escape would have to be effected in her own way and in her own time. To be governed by ambition was only a shade or two better than being governed by convention. The drawing room in which she and Ronnie were sitting was of such proportions that one hardly knew whether it was intended to be one room or several,

and it had the merit of being moderately cool. At two o'clock on a particularly hot to Lye afternoon, in the coolest of its many alcoves, servants had noiselessly set out and improvised luncheon table, attempting array of carriare, crab and mushroom salads, cold asparagus, slender hot bottles, and high stemmed wine goblets peeped out from amid a setting of Charlotte clem roses. Cicily rose from

her seat and went over to the piano. Come she said, touching the young man lightly with a fingertip on top of his very sleek, copper hued head. We're going to have picnic lunch up here today. It's so much cooler than any of the downstairs rooms, and we sha'n't be that with the servants trotting in and out all the time. Rather a good idea of mine, wasn't it, Ronnie, after looking anxiously to see that the word picnic did not portend tongue, sandwiches and biscuits, gave the idea his blessing.

What is young Store's profession, someone had once asked concerning him. He has a great many friends who have independent incomes, had been the answer. The meal was begun in appreciative silence. A picnic in which three kinds of red pepper were available for the caviare demanded a certain amount of respectful attention. My heart ought to be like a singing bird to day, i suppose, said Cecily. Presently, because your good man is coming home, asked Ronnie.

Cecily nodded. He's expected sometime this afternoon, though I'm rather vague as to which train he arrives by. Rather stifling day for railway traveling. And is your heart doing the singing bird business? Asked Ronnie. There depends, said Cecily. If I may choose the bird a missle thrush would do. Perhaps it sings loudest and stormy. Whether I believe Ronnie disposed of two or three stems of asparagus before making any comment on this remark? Is there going to

be stormy? Whether, he asked? The domestic barometers sit rather that way, said Cecily. You see, Mary has been away for ever so long, and of course there'll be lots of things he won't be used to, and I'm afraid matters may be rather strained and uncomfortable for a time. Do you mean that he will object to me, asked Ronnie. Not in the least, said Cecily. He's quite broad minded on most subjects, and he realizes this is an age in which sensible people know thoroughly well what they want

and are determined to get what they want. It pleases me to see a lot of you, and to spoil you, and to pay you extravagant compliments about your good looks and your music, and to imagine at times that I'm in danger of getting fond of you. I don't see any harm in it, and I don't suppose Mary will either. In fact, I shouldn't be surprised if he takes rather a liking to you. No, it's the general situation that will trouble and exasperate him. He's not had time to get accustomed

to the fate a compli like we have. It will break on him with horrible saddenness. He was somewhere in Russia when the war broke out, wasn't he said Ronnie, Somewhere in the wilds of eastern Siberia, shooting and bird collecting, miles away from a railway or telegraph line. And if it all over before he knew anything about it didn't last very long, when you come

to think of it. He would due home somewhere about that time, And when the weeks slipped by without my hearing from him, I quite thought he'd been captured in the Baltic or somewhere on the way back. It turned out he was down with marsh fever and some out of the way spot, and everything was over and finished with before he got back to civilization and newspapers. It must have been a bit of a shock, said Ronnie. Busy with

a well devised salad. Still I don't see why there should be domestic storms when he comes back, You're heart are responsible for the catastrophe that has happened, No, said Cecily. But he'll come back naturally, feeling sore and savage with everything he sees around him, and he won't realize just at once that we've been through all at ourselves and have reached the stage of sullen acquiescence

in what can't be helped. He won't understand, for instance, how we can be enthusiastic and excited over Galla Musselford's debut and things of that sort. He'll think we're a set of calloush bevelers fiddling while Rome is burning. In this case, said Ronnie, Rome isn't burning, it's burnt. All that remains to be done is to rebuild it when possible, exactly, And he'll say we're not doing much to helping at that. But protested Ronie, the

whole thing has only just happened. Rome wasn't built in a day, and we can't rebuild our room in the day. I know, said Cecily, But so many of our friends, and especially Murray's friends, have taken the thing in a tragical fashion and cleared off to the colonies or shut themselves up in their country houses, as though there was a sort of moral leprosy of

infecting London. I don't see what good that does, said Ronnie. It doesn't know a good, but it's what a lot of them have done because they felt like doing it, and Murray will feel like doing it too, and that's where I foresee trouble and disagreement. Ronnie shrugged his shoulders. I would take things tragically if I saw the good of it, he said. As matters stand, it's too late in the day and too early to be anything but philosophical about what one can't hel help for the present. We've just

got to make the best of things. Besides, you can't very well turn down Gaula at the last moment. I'm not going to turn down Gaula or anybody, said Cecily. With a decision. I think it would be silly, and silliness doesn't appeal to me. That is why I foresee storms on the domestic horizon. After all, Gaula has her career to think of, do you know, she added, with a change of tone, I rather

wish you'd fall in love with Gaula. It would make me horribly jealous, and a little jealousy is such a good tonic for any woman who knows how to dress well. Also, Ronnie, it would prove that you are capable of falling in love with some one of which i've grave doubts up to the present. Love is one of the few things in which the make believe is superior to the genuine, said Ronnie. It'd lasts longer, and you get more fun out of it, and it's easier to replace when you've done with

it. Still, it's rather like playing with colored paper instead of playing with fire, objected Cecily. A footman came round the corner with the trained silence that tactfully contrives to make itself felt A mister Luton to see you, madam, he announced. Shall I say you're in mister Luton? Oh? Yes,

said Cecily. He'll probably have something to tell us about Gaula's concert, she added, turning to Ronnie. Tony Luton was a young man who had sprung from the people and had taken care that there should be no recoil. He was scarcely twenty years of age, but a tightly packed chronicle of vicissitudes

lay behind his sprightly insucian appearance. Since his fifteenth year he had lived heaven knew how, getting sometimes a minor engagement at some minor music hall, sometimes a temporary job as a secretary valid companion to a roving invalid, dining now and then on other's eggs and asparagus at one of the smarter West End restaurants, at other times devouring a kipper or a sausage in some stuffy edge where

road eating house, always seemingly amused by life, and always amusing. It is possible that somewhere in such heart as he possessed, there lurked a rankling bitterness against the hard things of life, or a scrap of gratitude towards the one or two friends who had helped him disinterestedly. But his most intimates associates

could not have guessed at the existence of such feelings. Tony Luton was just a merry eyed, dancing fawn whom fate had surrounded with streets instead of woods, And it would have been in the highest degree and artistic to have sounded him for a heart or a heartache. The Dancing of the Fawn took one day a livelier and more assured turn. The joyousness became more real, and

the worst of the vicissitudes seemed suddenly over. A musical friend, gifted with mediocre but marketable abilities, supplied Tony with a song for which he obtained a trial performance at an East End hall, dressed as a jockey for no particular reason except that the costume suited him. He sang. They quaffed the Gay Bubbli in Eccleston Square to an appreciative audience, which included the manager of a

famous West End theater of varieties. Tony and his song won the magisterial favor and were immediately transplanted to the West End house, where they scored a success of which the drooping music hall industry was at the moment badly in need. It was just after the great catastrophe, and men of the London world were in no humor to think they had witnessed the inconceivable befall them. They had nothing but political ruin to stare at, and they were anxious to look the

other way. The words of Tony's song were more or less meaningless, though he sang them remarkably well. But the tune, with its air of slyness and furtive joyousness, appealed in some unaccountable manner to people who were furtively unhappy

and who were trying to appear stoically cheerful. What must be must be, and it's a poor heart that never rejoices were the popular expressions of the London public at that moment, and the men who had to cater for that public were thankful when they were able to stumble across anything that fitted in with the prevailing mood. For the first time in his life, Tony Luton discovered that agents and managers were a leisured class, and that office boys had manners.

He entered Cecily's drawing room with the air of one to whom assurance of manner had become a sheathed weapon, a court accessory rather than a trade implement. He was more quietly dressed than the usual run of music hall successes. He had looked critically at life from too many angles not to know that though clothes cannot make a man, they can certainly damn him. Thank you, I have lunched already, he said, in answer to a question from Sicily.

Thank you, he said again in a cheerful affirmative, as the question of hawk in at all Ice gold Goblet was propounded to him. I've come to tell you the latest about the gaul A muscle for the evening, he continued. Old Lawrence is putting his back into it, and it's rarely going to be rather a big affair. She's going to out Russian the Russians. Of course, she hasn't their technique nor a tenth of their training, but she's

having tons of advertisement. The name Gauler is almost an advertisement in itself. And then there's the fact that she's the daughter of a peer. She has temperament, said cecily, with the decision of one who makes a vague statement in a good cause, So Lawrence says, observed Tony, he discovers temperament in every one that he intends to boomb. He told me that I had temperament to the finger tips, and I was too polite to contradict him.

But I haven't told you the really important thing about the muscle for debut. It's a profound secret. More or less, so you might us promise not to breathe a word about it till half past four, when it will appear in all the six o'clock newspapers. Tony paused for dramatic effect while he drained

his goblet, and then made his announcement. Majesty is going to be present informally and unofficially, but still present in the flesh, a sort of casual dropping in, carefully heralded by unconfirmed rumor a week ahead heavens, exclaimed Cecily in genuine excitement. What a bold stroke Lady Shalem has worked that. I bet I suppose we will go down all write. Trust Laurence to see to that, said Tony. He knows how to fill his house with the right

sort of people, and he's not the one to risk of fiasco. He knows what he's about. I tell you it's going to be a big evening, I say, exclaimed Ronny. Suddenly give a supper party here for Gaula on the night and ask the Shalemb woman and all her crowd. It'd be awful fun Cecily caught at the suggestion with Sam in the usiasm. She did not particularly care for Lady Shayalamb, but she thought it would be just as

well to care for her as far as outward appearances went grace. Lady Shayalam was a woman who had blossomed into sudden importance by constituting herself a sort of foster mother to the fate a compli. At a moment when London was denuded of most of its aforetime social leaders, she had seen her opportunity and made the most of it. She had not contented herself with vowing to the inevitable. She had stretched out her hand to it and forced herself to smile graciously

at it, and her polite attentions had been reciprocated. Lady shaylamb, without being a beauty or a wit or a grand lady in the traditional sense of the word, was in a fair way to becoming a power in the land. Others more capable and with stronger claims to social recognition would doubtless overshadow her and displace her in due course, But for the moment she was a person whose good graces counted for something, and Cecily was quite alive to the advantage

of being in those good graces. It would be rather fun, she said, running over in her mind the possibilities of the suggested supper party. It would be jolly useful. But in Ronnie eagerly, you could get all sorts

of interesting people together and it would be an excellent advertisement for Gaula. Ronnie approved of supper parties on principle, but he was also thinking of the advantage which might accrue to the drawing Room concert which Cecily had projected, with himself as the chief performer, if he could be brought into contact with a wider circle of music patrons. I know it would be useful, said Cecily. It would be almost historical. There's no knowing who might not come to it,

and things are dreadfully slack in the entertaining line just now. The ambitious note in her character was making itself felt at that moment. Let's go down to the library and work out a list of people to invite, said Ronnie. A servant entered the room and made a brief announcement. A mister Yeovil has arrived, Madam Bother, said Ronnie sulkily. Now you'll cool off about

that supper party and turn down Gauler and the rest of us. It was certainly true that the supper had already seemed a more difficult proposition in Cecily's eyes, than it had a moment or two a go. You'll not forget my only daughter, Ian, though Sophia has crossed the sea, quoted Tony, with mocking laughter in his voice and eyes. Cecily went down to greet her husband. She felt that she was probably very glad that he was at home

once more. She was angry with herself for not feeling great a certainty on the point. Even the well beloved, however, can select the wrong moment for return. If Cecily Yovill's heart was like a singing bird, it was of a kind that has frequent lapses into silence. Of chapter one chapter two of When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please

go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Imenta, When William Came by Saki, Chapter two, The Homecoming, Murray Yeovil got out of the boat train at Victoria Station and stood waiting in an attitude something between listlessness and impatience, while a porter dragged his light traveling kit out of the railway carriage and went in search of his heavier baggage with a hand truck. Yeovil was a gray faced young man with restless eyes and a rather wistful mouth, and an

air of lassitude that was evidently only a temporary characteristic. The hot, dusty station, with its blended crowds of dawdling and scurrying people, its little streams of suburban passengers pouring out every now and then from this or that platform, like ants swarming across a garden path, made a wearisome climax to what had been a rather wearisome journey. Yeovil glanced quickly, almost furtively, around him in all directions, with the air of a man who is constrained by morbid

curiosity to look for things that he would rather not see. The announcements placed in German alternatively with English, over the booking office, left luggage office, refreshment buffets, and so forth. The crowned eagle and monogram displayed on the post boxes caught his eye in quick succession. He turned to help the porter to shepherd his belongings on to the truck, and followed him to the outer yard of the station, where a string of taxi cabs was being slowly absorbed

by an outpouring crowd of others. Portmanteau raps and a trunk or two, much belabeled and travel worn, were stowed into a taxi, and Yovil turned to give the direction to the driver. Twenty eight Berkshire Street baksheus trash achtroshradsich, echoed the man, a bulky spectacled individual of unmistakable Teuton type twenty eight Berkshire Street, repeated Yeovil and got into the cab, leaving the driver to

retranslate the direction into his own language. A succession of cabs leaving the station blocked the roadway for a moment or two, and Jovil had leisure to observe the fact that Victoria Strasa was lettered side by side with the familiar English name of the street. A notice directing the public to the neighboring swimming baths was also written up in both languages. London had become a bilingual city. Even as warsaw, the cab threaded its way swiftly along Buckingham Palace Road towards the

mall. As they passed along front of the Palace, the traveler turned his head resolutely away that he might not see the alien uniforms at the gate and the eagle standard flapping in the sunlight. The taxi driver, who seemed to have combative instincts, slowed down as he was turning into the mall and pointed to the white pile of memorial statuary in front of the palace gates. Grossmutterdenkmle

Yah. He announced and resumed his journey. Arrived at his destination, the Oval stood on the steps of his house and pressed the bell with an odd sense of forlornness, as though he were a stranger drifting from nowhere into a land that had no cognisance of him. A moment later he was standing in his own hall, the object of respectful solicitude and detention. Sprucely garbed and groomed lackeys busied themselves with his battered travel soiled baggage. The door closed on

the guttural voiced taxi driver and the glaring jewel sunshine. The wearisome journey was over, Poor dear, how dreadfully pulled down you look, said Cecily, when the first greetings had been exchanged. It's been a slow business getting well, said Yovil. I'm only three quarter away there. Yet he looked at his reflection in a mirror and laughed ruefully. You should have seen what I looked like five or six weeks ago, he added. You ought to have

let me come out and nurse you, said Cecily. You know I wanted to. Oh they nursed me well enough, said Yovil. And it would have been a shame dragging you out there. A small finished health resort out of the season is not a very amusing place, and he would have been worse for anyone who didn't talk Russian. You must have been buried alive there, said Cecily, with commiseration in her voice. I wanted to be buried alive, said Yovil. The news from the outer world was not of a

kind that helped to despondent valid towards convalescence. They spoke to me as little as possible about what was happening, And I was grateful for your letters, because they also told me very little. When one is abroad among foreigners, one's country's misfortunes cause one and acuter more personal distress than they would at home. Even Well, you're at home now anyway, said Cecily, And you

can jog along the road to complete recovery at your own pace. A little quiet shooting this autumn, and a little hunting, just enough to keep you fit and not to overtire you. You mustn't overtax your strength. I am getting my strength back, all right, said yo Will. This journey hasn't tired me half as much as one might have expected. It's the awful drag of listlessness, mental and physical that is the worst after effect of these marsh

fevers. And they drain the energy out of you in bucketfuls, and it trickles back again in teaspoonfuls. And just now, untiring energy is what I shall need, even more than strength. I don't want to degenerate into a slacker. Look here, Mary said Cecily. After we've had dinner together to night, I'm going to do a seemingly unwifely thing. I'm going to go out and leave you alone with an old friend. Doctor Holham is coming in to drink coffee and smoke with you. I arranged this because I knew it

was what you would like. Men can talk these things over best by themselves, and Harlem can tell you everything that's happened since you went away. It will be a dreary story, I'm afraid, but you will want to hear it. All. It was a nightmare time, but now one sees it in a calmer perspective. I feel in a nightmare still, said Jovil. We all felt like that, said Cecily, rather with the air of an elder person who tells a child that it will understand things better when it grows

up. Time is always something for narcotic you know, things seem absolutely unbearable, then bit by bit we find out that we're bearing them. And now, dear, I'll fill up your notification paper and leave you to superintend your unpacking. Robert will give you any help you want. What's the notification paper, asked Yovil. Oh, A stupid form to be filled up when any one arrives to say where they've come from and their business, and their nationality

in religion and all that sort of thing. We rather more bureaucratic than we used to be, you know. Yovil said nothing, but into the sallow grayness of his face there crept a dark flush that faded presently and left his color more gray and bloodless than before. The journey seemed suddenly to have recommenced. He was under his own roof. His servants were waiting on him, His familiar possessions were in evidence around him, but the sense of being at

home had vanished. It was as though he had arrived at some wayside hotel and been asked to register his name and status and destination. Other things of disgust and irritation he had foreseen in the London coming to the alterations on stamps and coinage, the intrusive Teuton element, the alien uniforms cropping up everywhere,

the new orientation of social life. Such things he was prepared for, but this personal evidence of his subject state came on him unawares at a moment when he had so to speak, laid his armor aside sicily spoke lightly of the hateful formality that had been forced on them. Would he too come to regard things in the same acquiescence spirit. End of chapter two Chapter three of When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are

in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox or reading by and Iminta. When William Came By Saki chapter three, The Metskis Are. I was in the early stages of my fever when I got the first inkling of what was going on, said Jobil to the doctor, as they sat over their coffee in the recess of the big smoking room, just able to potter about of it in the daytime, fighting against depression

and inertia feverish the evening came on and delirious in the light. My game tracker and my attendant were both Buriats and spoke very little Russian, and that was the only language we had in common to converse him. In matters concerning food and sport, we soon got to understand each other, but on other subjects we were not easily able to exchange ideas. One day, my tracker had been to a distant trading store to get some things of which we were

in need. The store was eighty miles from the nearest point of railroad, eighty miles of terribly bad roads, but it was in its way a center and transmitter of news from the outside world. The tracker brought back with him vague tidings of a conflict of some sort between the metskids Are and the Angliskids

Are, and kept repeating the Russian word for defeat. The anglizkids are I recognized, of course, as the king of England, But my brain was too sick and dull to read any further meaning into the man's reiterated gabble. I grew so ill just then that I had to give up the struggle against fever and make my way as best I could towards the nearest point where nursing

and doctoring could be had. It was one evening in a lonely rest hut on the edge of a huge forest, as I was waiting for my boy to bring the meal for which I was feverishly impatient, and which I knew I should loathe. As soon as it was brought and the nation of the

word Metsky flashed on me. I had thought of it as referring to some Oriental potentate, some rebellious rajah perhaps, who was giving trouble and whose followers had possibly discomfited an isolated British force in some out of the way corner of our empire. And all of a sudden I knew that nemetskisar German Emperor, had been the name that the man had been trying to convey to me. I shouted for the tracker and put him through a breathless cross examination. He

confirmed what my fears had told me. The Metzkidsar was a big European ruler. He had been in conflict with the Anglisky Tzar, and the latter had been defeated swept away. The man spoke the word that he used for ships and made an energetic pantomime to express the sinking of a fleet. Harland. There was nothing for it but to hope that this was a false, groundless rumor that had somehow crept to the confines of civilization. In my saner balanced

moments, it was possible to disbelieve it. But if you have ever suffered from delirium, you will know what raging torments of agony I went through in the nights, and my brain fought and re fought that rumored disaster. The doctor gave a murmur of sympathetic understanding, then continued Jovil. I reached the small Siberian town towards which I had been struggling. There was a little colony of Russians there, traders, officials, a doctoral tunes of army officers.

I put up at the primitive hotel restaurant, which was the general gathering place of the community. I knew quickly that the news was true. Russians are the most tactful of any European race that I've ever met. They did not stare with insolent or pity and curiosity, but there was something changed in their attitude which told me that the traveling Britain was no longer in their eyes the

interesting, respect commanding personality that he had been in past days. I ran to my own room, where the samovar was bubbling its familiar tune, and a smiling red shirted Russian boy was helping my buriat's servant to unpack my wardrobe, and I asked for any back numbers of newspapers that could be supplied at a moment's notice. I was given a bundle of well thumbed cheats, odd pieces of the Novovrim, the Mosko of Evvadonski, one or two complete numbers

of local papers published at perm and a mosque. I don't read Russian well, though I speak it fairly readily, but from the fragments of disconnected telegrams that I pieced together, I gathered enough information to acquaint me with the extent of the tragedy that had been worked out in a few crowding hours in the corner of northwestern Europe. I searched frantically for telegrams of later dates that would put a better complexion on the matter, there would retrieve something from the ruin.

Presently, I came across a page of the illustrated supplement that the Novorimya publishes once a week. There was a photograph of a long fronted building with a flag flying over it, labeled the new standard floating over Buckingham Palace. The picture was not much more than a smudge, but the flag, possibly touched up, was unmistakable. It was the Eagle of the Nimetskid Tzar.

I have a vivid recollection of that plainly furnished little room, with the inevitable guilt icon in one corner, and the samovar hissing and girdling on the table, and the thrumming music of a bala liika orchestra coming up from the restaurant below. The next gooherent thing I can remember was weeks and weeks later, discussing in an impersonal, detached manner whether I was strong enough to stand the

fatigue of the long railway journey to Finland. Since then, Hallm, I've been encouraged to keep my mind as much off the war and public of airs as possible, and I've been glad to do so. I knew the worst, and there was no particular use in deepening my despondency by dragging out the details. But now I'm more or less alive man again. I want to

fit in the gaps in my knowledge of what happened. You know how much I know and how little those fragments of Russian newspapers were about all the information that I had. I don't even know clearly how the whole thing started. Yeovil settled himself back in his chair with the air of a man who has done some necessary talking and now assumes the role of listener. It started, said the doctor, but the wholly unimportant disagreement about some frontier business in East

Africa. There was a slight attack of nerves in the stock markets. Then the whole thing seemed an a fair way to being settled. Then the negotiations of de Fair began to drag, and duly there was a flatter of nervousness in the money world. And then one morning the papers reported a highly menacing speech by one of the German ministers, and the situation began to look black.

Indeed, he would be disavowed, everyone said over here. But in less than twenty four hours, those who knew anything knew that the crisis was on us. Only that knowledge came too late. War between two such civilized and enlightened nations as an impossibility, one of our leaders of public opinion had declared around the Saturday. On the following Friday, the war had indeed become

an impossibility because he could no longer carry it on. It burst on us with calculated suddenness, and we were just not enough everywhere where the pressure came. Our ships were good against their ships. Our seamen were better than their seamen, but our ships were not able to cope with their ships, plus their superiority an aircraft. Our trade men were good against their trained men, but they could not be in several cases at once, and the enemy could.

Our half trained men and our untrained men could not master the signs of war at a moment's notice, and a moment's notice was all they got. The enemy were a nation apprentice in arms. We were not even the idle apprentice. We had not deemed apprenticeship worth a while. There was courage enough for anning loose in the land, but it was like unharness electricity. They controlled no forces. It struck no blues. There was no time for the

heroism and their devotion which had drawn out struggle however hopeless can produce. The war was over almost as soon as it had begun. After the reverses were hung with lightning rapidity in the first three days of warfare. The newspapers made no effort to pretend that the situation could be retrieved. Editors and public alike recognized that these were blows over the heart, and that it was a matter of moment before we were counted out. One might liken the whole affair to

a snap checkmate early in a game of chess. One side had thought out the wooves and brought their requisite pieces into blay. The other side was hampered and helpless, but its resources unavailable, It striated to discount it in advance that in a nut show is the last three of the war. Yoval was silent for a moment or two, and then he asked, and the sequel the peace. Their collapse was so complete that I fancy even the enemy were

hardly prepared for the consequences of their victory. No one had quite realized what one disastrous campaign would mean for an either nation with a closely packed population. The conquerors were in a position to dictate what terms they pleased, and it was not wonderful that their ideas of a grandisement expanded in the hour of intoxication. There was no European combination did to see them nay, and certainly no one power was going to be rush enough to step in to contest the terms

of the treaty that they imposed on the conquered. The annexation had probably never been a dream before the war. After the war, it suddenly became temptingly practical. Varum Nicht became the theme of leader writers and the German press. They pointed out that person defeated and humiliated but with enormous powers of recuperation would

be a dangerous and inevitable enemy for the German of tomorrow. But Britain, incorporated within the Holland zal And Empire, would merely be a disaffected province without a navy to make its disaffection, a serious menace and a great tax paying capabilities which would be available for relieving the burdens of the other imperial states. Wherefore why not annex the varon Nicht party prevailed Our king as un retired with his court to Delhi as Emperor in the East, with most of its overseas

dominions still subject is a sway. The British childs came under the German crown, as Reich's land was sort of Alsace Lorraine washed by the North Sea instead of the Rhine. We still retain or Parliament, but it a clipped and prune down shadow of its former self, with most of its functions in beans. When elections were held, it was difficult to get decent candidates to come

forward or to get people to vote. It makes one smile bitterly to think that a year or two ago we were seriously squabbling as to who should have votes. A course, the old party divisions are more or less crumbled away. The Liberals naturally under the blackest of clouds for having steered the country to disaster, not a dodom justice. It was no more therefore than the fault

of any other party in a democracy. Such as ours. Was the government of the Damers more or less reflect the ideas and temperament of the Niche in all vital matters, and the British nation in those days could not have been persuaded of the urgent need for military apprenticeship, or of the deadly nature of its danger. It was willing now and the end be half frightened and to have half measures, but one might better say quarter measures taken to reassure it,

and the governments of the day were willing to take them. But any political party or group of statesmen that had said that danger is enormous and immediate, the sacrifices and burdens must be enormous and immediate. But a met with certain defeated the Poles. Still, of course, the Liberals, as the party that held office for nearly a decade, incurred the odium of a people

maddened by defeat and humiliation. One minister, who had less responsibility for military organization than perhaps any of them, was attacked and nearly killed at Newcastle.

Another was hiding for three days on Exmore and escaped in disc And the Conservatives they are also under eclipse, but it's more or less voluntary in their case, but gear narrations they had taken their standards supporters of throne and constitution, and when they suddenly found a constitution gone and the throne filled by an alien dynasty, no political orientation had vanished, and in much the same position as

the Jacobites occupied after the hadoberi ennaxation. Many of the leading Tory families have emigrated to the British lands beyond the seas. Others are shut up in their country houses, retrenching their expenses, sending their ecres and investing their money abroad. The lab of Action again are almost in as bad odor as the Liberals,

because of having hobnob too effusively and ostentatiously. But the German Democratic parties on the evil of the war, exploiting an evangel of universal brotherhood which did not blunt a single Tuton Bennet. When the hour came, I suppose in time party division will reascet themselves in some form or other. There will be a socialist party in the mercantile and manufacturing interests will evolve a sort of bourgeoisie

party, and the different religious bodies will try to get themselves represented. The Oval made a movement of impatience. All these things that you forecast, he said, must take time, considerable time. Is this nightmare then, to go on for ever? There's not a nightmare, unfortunately, said the doctor.

It is our reality. But surely a nation such as ours, a verrile, highly civilized nation with an age long tradition of mastery behind it, cannot be held under for ever by a few thousand bearded and machine guns. We must surely rise up one day and drive them out, dear man, said the doctor. We might, of course, at some given moment overpower the garrison that is maintained here and seize the forts. Perhaps we might be able to mind the harbors. But what then, in a fortnight or so

we could be starved into unconditional submission. Remember our the advantages of isolated position that told in our favor while we had the sea dominion tell against us. Now that the sea dominion is in other hands, the enemy would not need to mobilize a single army corps or to bring a single battleship into action. A fleet of nimble cruisers and destroyers circling round our coasts would be sufficient to shut out our food supplies. Are you trying to tell me that this is

a final overthrow, said Jovil in a shaking voice. Are we to remain a subject race like the Poles? Let us hope for a better fate, said the doctor. Our opportunity may come if the master power is ever involved in an unsuccessful naval war with some other nation, or perhaps in some time of European crisis, when everything hung in the balance. Our latent hostility might have to be squared by a concession of independence. That's what we have to

hope for and watch for. Mania the hand the conquerors have to count on time and tact to weaken and finally obliterate the old feelings of nationality. The middle aged of to day will grow old and acquiescent in the changed state of things. The young generations will grow up never having known anything different. It's a far cried Delhi, as the old Indian proverb says, and the strange half European, half Asiatic caught out there will see more and more a thing

exotic and unreal. The King across the water was a rallying cry once upon a time in our history, when a king on the farther side of the Indian ocean is a shadowy competitor for one who alternates between potsdam and windsor. I want you to tell me everything, said Yeovil, after another pause. Tell me, hollm, how far has this obliterating process of time and tact gone? Seems to be pretty fairly started already. I bought a newspaper as soon as I landed, and I read it in the train coming up,

and I read things that puzzled and disgusted me. There were announcements of concerts and plays, and first nights and private views. There were even small dances. There are advertisements of houseboats and weekend cottages, and string bands for garden parties. It struck me that it was rather like merrymaking with a dead body lying in the house. You will, said the doctor. You must bear in mind, do things first, the necessity for the life of the country

going on as if nothing had happened. It's true that many thousands of our working men and women have emigrated, and thousands of our upper and middle class too. They were the people who were not tied down by business or who could afford to cut those ties. But those represent comparatively a few out of the many. The great businesses, and the small businesses must go on. People must be fed and clothed, and housed and medically treated, And there

a thousand and one wants, a necessity is supplied. Look at me, for instance, however much I loathed coming under a foreign domination and paying taxes to an Earnian government, I can't abandon me practice and my patience and set up a new in Toronto or Allahabaden. If I could, some other doctor would have to take my place here high or that other doctor must have our servants and motors, and food and furniture, and newspapers. Even our sport.

The golf links and the hunting fields have been well night deserted since the war. Will they are beginning to get back their motors because outdoor sports has become a necessity, and of very rational necessity, with numbers of men who have to work otherwise in unnatural and exacting conditions. That is one factor of the situation. The other affects London more especially, But through London it influences

the rest of the country to a certain extent. You'll see you around you here much that will strike you as indications of halfness, indifference to the calamity that has befallen our nation. Well, you must remember that many things in modern life, especially in the big cities, are not national but international. In the world of music and arts and drama, for instance, the foreign

names a legion they confront with with every return. Some of our British defaultees of such answer are more a clim atties to the ways of Munich and Mosque than they're familiar with the life, say of Sterning or York. For years they have lived and thought and spoken in an atmosphere and jargon of the nationalized

culture. Even those of them who never left our shores, they would take pains to be intimately familiar with the domestic affairs and views of some Galician gipsy dramatists, and gravably caught and discuss his opinions on debts and mistresses and cookery. But they would shudder at ye kin John Peel as a piece of uncost

barbarity. You cannot expect a world of that sort to be permanently concerned or downcast because the crown of Charlemagne takes its place now on top of the royal box in the theaters, or don't they head of programs at State concerts and Lin't are the Jews. There are many in land, or at least in London, said Yobel. There are even more of them now than there used to be, said hollm And to a great extent a disliker of je was myself. But I'll be fair to them and admit that those of them who

were in any genuine sense British should remain British. And I stuck by us loyally in our misfortune, all honor to them. Were are the others, the men who, by temperament and everything else, were farm of Teuton, or Polish or Latin than they were British. It was not to be expected that they would be outbroken, because London had suddenly lost its place among the

political capitals of the world and become a cosmopolitan city. They had appreciated the free and easy liberty of the old days under British for all, but there was a stiff insularity in the ruling race that they chafed against. Now.

Putting aside some petty government restrictions that Teutonic bureaucracy has brought in, were as rarely in their eyes, more license and social adaptability in London than before it has taken on some of the aspects of a no man's land, and the Jew, if he likes nay, almost consider himself as of the dominant race. But inu rate is ubiquitous pleasure of the caffeine capaine boulevard, kind a sort of thing that gave Berlin the aspect of the gay's capital in Europe within

the last decade. That is the insidious leaven that will help to d nationalized London. Berlin will probably climb back to some of its old austerity and simplicity, a world ruling city with the great sense of its position and its responsibilities, while London will become more and more the center of what these people understand by life. Y Oval made a movement of impatience and disgust. I know,

I know, said the doctor sympathetically. Life and enjoyment mean to una howl of the wolf in a forest, the call of a wild swan on the frozen Tumberus, the smell of a wood fire in some little inn among the mountains. There's more music to you in the quick thud thud of hoofs on deser mud, as a free stepping horses laid up toar a tent door, and in all the dronings and flourishing that highly paide orchestra can relout to an expensively fed audience. But the tastes of modern London, as we see

them, crystallize around us li in a very different direction. People of the world that I am speaking of, our dominant world at the present moment, heard together as close effect to the square yard as possible, doing nothing worth doing, and saying nothing worth saying, but doing and saying it over over again, listening to the same melodies, watching the same artists, echoing the same catchwords, hardering the same dishes, in the same restaurants, suffering each

other's cigarette smoke and perfumes, and conversation feverishly, anxiously, making arrangements to meet each other again to morrow, next week, and the week after next, and repeat the same gregarious experience. If they would have not heard it together in a corner of western London, watching each other with restless intelligent eyes, they'd be heard it together at Brighton or deep doing the same thing.

Well, you will find that life of that sort goes forward just as usual, only it's even more prominent and noticeable now because there's less public life of other kinds. Yovil said something which was possibly the burry At word for the near the world outside. In the neighboring square, a band had been playing at intervals during the evening. Now it struck up an air that Yovil had already heard whistle several times since his landing, an air with a captivating suggestion

of slyness and furtive joyousness running through it. He rose and walked across the window, opening it a little wider. He listened till the last notes had died away. What is that you they've just paid, he asked. You're here at Darfen enough, said the doctor. A Frenchman writing in matt Earlia the day called it the national anthem of the Feta Comfy. End of chapter three, Chapter four of When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox

recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Iminta, When William Came By Saki, Chapter four esist verboten. Yeoville wakened next morning to the pleasant sensation of being in a household very elaborate machinery for the smooth

achievements of one's daily life was noiselessly and unceasingly at work. Fever and the long weariness of convalescence in indifferently comfortable surroundings had given luxury a new value in his eyes. Money had not always been plentiful with him in his younger days. In his twenty eighth year, he had inherited a fairly substantial fortune,

and he had married a wealthy woman a few months later. It was characteristic of the man and his breed that the chief use to which he put his newly acquired wealth had been in seizing the opportunity which it gave him for indulging in unlimited travel in wild, out of the way regions where the comforts of life were meagerly represented. Cicily occasionally accompanied him to the threshold of his expeditions, such as Cairo or Saint Petersburg or Constantinople, but her own tastes in

the matter of roving were more or less condensed. Within an area that comprised Cannes, Homburg, the Scottish Highlands and the Norwegian boards. Things outlandish and barbaric appeal to her, chiefly when presented under artistic but highly civilized stage management on the boards of Covent Garden, And if she wanted to look at wolves or sandgrouse, she preferred doing so in the company of an intelligent fellow of

the Zoological Society on some fine Sunday afternoon in Regent's Park. It was one of the bonds of union and good fellowship between her husband and herself that each understood and sympathized with the other's tastes, without in the least wanting to share them. They went their own ways and were pleased and comrade like when the ways happened to run together for a span, without self reproach or heart searching

when the ways diverged. Moreover, they had separate and adequate banking accounts, which constitute, if not the keys of the matrimonial heaven, at least the oil that lubricates them. Jovil found Cicily and breakfast waiting for him in the cool breakfast room, and enjoyoid with the appreciation of a recent invalid the comfort and resources of a meal that had not to be ordered or thought about in advance, but seemed as though it were there fore ordained from the beginning of

time. In its smallest detail, each desire of the breakfasting mind seemed to have its realization in some dish, lurking unobtrusively in hidden corners until asked for. Did one want grilled mushrooms English fashion? They were there, black and moist and sizzling and extremely edible. Did one design mushrooms alarous? They appeared

blanched and cool and toothsome under their white blanketing of sauce. At one's bidding was a service of coffee, prepared with rather more foresight and circumspection than would

go to the preparation of a revolution in a South American republic. The exotic blooms that reigned in profusion over the other parts of the house more scrupulously banished from the breakfast room, bowls of wild thyme and other flowering weeds of the meadow and hedgerow gave it an atmosphere of country freshness that was in keeping with the morning meal. You look dreadfully tired, still, said Cecily critically. Otherwise I would recommend a ride in the park before he gets too hot.

There's a new cob in the stable that you'll just love. But he's rather lively, and you'd better content yourself for the present with some more sedate exercise than he's likely to give you. He's apt to try and jump out of his skin when the flies tease him. The park's rather jolly for a walk just now, I think that will be about my form after my long journey, said Jovil, and ours strove before lunch under the trees, Na or not fatigue me unduly. In the afternoon, I'll look at one or two

people. Don't count on finding too many of your old set, said Cecily, rather hurriedly. I dare say some of them will find their way back sometime, But at present there's been rather an exodus the breeds, said Yeovil, Are they here? No? The breeds are in Scotland at their place in Sutherlandshire. They don't come south now. And the Ricards are farming somewhere

in East Africa, the whole lot of them. Valor has got an appointment of some sort in the Straits settlement and has taken his family with him. The Collards are down at their mother's place in Norfolk. A German banker has bought their house in Manchester Square, and hebways, asked Yovil. Dick headways in India, said Cecily, But his mother lives in Paris. Poor Hugo, you know, was killed in the war. My friends, the Allenson's are in Paris too. It's rather clearance, isn't it. However, there

are some left, and I expect others will come back in time. Pitherby's here. He's one of those who are trying to make the best of things under the new regime, would be, said Yeovil shortly. It's a difficult question, said Cecily, whether one should stay at home and face the music or go away and live a transplanted life under the British flag. Either attitude might be dictated by patriotism. It's one thing to face the music, it's

another that dance to it, said Yovil. Cecily poured out some more coffee for herself and change the conversation. You'll be into lunch. I suppose the clubs are not very attractive just now, I believe, and the restaurants are mostly hot. In the middle of the day. Ronnie's store is coming in.

He's here pretty often these days. A rather good looking young animal and with something midway between talent and genius in the piano playing line, not long haired and semitic, or check or anything of that sort, I suppose, asked Yovil. Cecily laughed at the vision of Ronnie conjured up her husband's words. No, beautifully groomed and clipped and Anglo saxon. I expect you'll like

him. He plays bridge almost as well as he plays the piano. I suppose you wonder at anyone who can play bridge well wanting to play the piano. I'm not quite so intolerant as all that, said, Yeovil. Anyhow, I promised to like Ronnie. Is anyone else coming to lunch? Joan Mardle will probably drop in. In fact, I'm afraid she's a certainty. She invited herself in that way of hers that brooks of no refusal. On the other hand, as a mitigating circumstance, there will be a pont d'asperge

omelet such as few kitchens could turn out. So don't be late. Yeovil set out for his morning walk with the curious sensation of one who starts on a voyage of discovery in a land that is well known to him. He turned into the park at Hyde Park Corner and made his way along the familiar paths and alleys that bordered the row. The familiarity vanished when he left the region of fenced in lawns and rhododendron bushes and came to the open space that

stretched away beyond the bandstand. The bandstand was still there, and a military band in sky blue Saxon uniform was executing the first item in the forenoon program of music. Around it, instead of the serried rows of green chairs that Yo who remembered, was spread out an acre or so of small round tables, most of which had their quota of customers engaged in a steady consumption of

larger beer, coffee, lemonade, and syrups. Further in the background, but well within ear shot of the band, a gaily painted pagoda restaurant sheltered a number of more commodious tables under its awnings and gave a hint of convenient indoor accommodation for wet or windy weather. Movable screens of trellis, trained foliage and climbing roses formed little hedges by means of which any particular table could be

shut off from its neighbors, if semi privacy were desired. One or two decorative advertisements of popularized brands of champagne and rhine wines adorned the outside walls of the building, and under the central gable of its upper story was a flamboyant portrait of a stern faced man whose image and superscription might also be found on the newer coinage of the land. A mass of bunting hung in folds round the flagpole on the gable, and blew out now and then on the favoring

breeze a long three colored strip black, white and scarlet. And over the whole scene the elm trees towered with an absurd sardonic air of nothing having changed around their roots. The oval stood for a minute or two, taking in every detail of the unfamiliar spectacle. They have certainly accomplished something that we never attempted, he muttered to himself. Then he turned on his heel and made his way to the shady walk that ran alongside the row. At first sight,

little was changed in the aspect of the well known exercising ground. One or two riding masters cantered up and down, as of yore, with their attendant broods of anxious faced young girls and awkwardly bumping women pupils, while horsey looking men put marketable animals through their paces or drew up to the rails for long conversations with horsey looking friends on foot. Sportingly attired young women sitting astride of their horses careered by at intervals, as though an extremely game fox were

leading hounds a merry chase a short way ahead of them. It all seemed much as usual. Presently, from the middle distance, a bright patch of color set in a whirl of dust, drew rapidly nearer and resolved itself into

a group of cavalry officers, extending their charges in a smart gallop. They were well mounted and sat their horses to perfection, and they made a brave show as they raced past Jovil with a clink and clatter and rhythmic thud of hoofs, and became once more a patch of color in a whirl of dust. An answering glow of color seemed to have burnt itself into the gray face of the young man who had seen them pass without appearing to look at them.

The stinging rush of blood accompanied by a choking catch in the throat, and a hot, white blindness across the eyes. The weakness of fever broke down at times the rampart of outward indifference that a man of Yoville's temperament builds coldly round his heart strings. The row and its riders had become suddenly detestable to the wanderer. He would not run the risk of seeing that insolently joyous

cavalcade come galloping past again. Beyond a narrow stretch of tree shaded grass lay the placid, sunlit water of the Serpentine, and Jovill made a short cut across the turf to reach its graveled bank. Cornch WHU read either English or German, asked a policeman who confronted him as he stepped off the turf. Yovil stared at the man, and then turned to look at a small, neatly printed notice to which the official was imperiously pointing. In two languages.

He was made known that it was forbidden and verboten, punishable and strarafbar to walk on the grass three shilling fine, said the policeman, extending his hand for the money. Do I pay you? Asked Jovil, feeling almost inclined to laugh. I'm rather a stranger to the new order of things. You pay me, said the policeman, and you receive acquittance for the sum paid. And he proceeded to tear a counterfoil receipt for a three shilling fine from a small pocket book. May I ask, said Yovil, as he handed

over the sun demanded and received his acquittance. What the red and white band on your sleeve stands for bilingual? Said the constable, with an air of importance. Preference is given to members of the force who qualify both languages. Nearly all the police engaged on park duty here bilingual. About as many foreigners as English used the parks nowadays. In fact, on a fine Sunday afternoon, you will find three foreigners to every two English. The park's habit is

more continental than British. I take it. And are there many Germans in the police force, asked Yuval. Well, yes, a good few there had to be, said the constable. There were such a lot of resignations when the change came, and they had to be filled up somehow. Lots of men what used to be in the force immigrated or found work of some other kind. But everybody couldn't take that line. Wives and children had to

be thought of. Tis every head of a family that can chuck up a job on the chance of finding another Starvation's been a lot of a good many that what went out. Those of us that stayed on got better pay, and we did before. But then, of course the duties are much more multitudinous they must be, said Yovil, fingering his three filling state document. Hi the way, he asked, are all the green plots in park out of bounds for human feet? Every whay where you see the notices, said

the policeman, And that's about three quarters of the whole grass space. There's been a lot of new gravel walks opened up in all directions. People don't want to walk on the grass when they've got clean paths to walk on. And with this parting reproof, the bilingual constable strode heavily away his loss of consideration and self esteem as a unito a sometime ruling race, evidently compensated for to some extent by his enhanced importance as an official. Are women and children,

thought Yovil as he looked after the retreating figure. Yes, that's one side of the problem, the children that have to be fed and schooled, the women folk that have to be cared for, an old mother, perhaps in the home that cannot be broken up, the old case of giving hostages. He followed the path alongside the Serpentine, passing under the archway of the

bridge, and continuing his walk into Kensington Gardens. In another moment, he was within view of the Peter Pan's statue and at once observed that it had companions. On one side was a group representing a scene from one of the Grim Fairy stories. On the other was Alice in conversation with Griffin and mock

Turtle, the episode looking distressingly stiff and meaningless in its sculptured form. Two other spaces had been cleared in the neighboring turf, evidently for the reception of further statue groups, which Yeoville mentally assigned to Strowel Peter and Little Lord Fauntleroy German middle class taste, he commented, but in this matter he certainly gave them a lead. I suppose the idea is that childish fancy is dead,

and it is only decent to erect some sort of memorial to it. The day was growing hotter, and the park had ceased to seem a desirable place to loiter in. Jovial turned his steps homeward, passing on his way the van stand with its surrounding acreage of tables. It was now nearly one o'clock and luncheon parties were beginning to assemble under the awnings of the restaurant. Lighter refreshments in the shape of sausages and potato salads were being carried out by scurrying

waiters to the drinkers of larger beer at small tables. A park orchestra in brilliant trappings had taken the place of the military band. As Yeovial passed, the musicians launched out into the tune which the doctor had truly predicted he would hear to repletion before he had been many days in London, the national anthem of the Fitter compli end of chapter four, Chapter five of When William Came By Sarkie. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the

public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Imenta, When William Came By Sarkie, Chapter five, La detre Cuisine. Joan Mardle had reached forty in the leisurely, untroubled fashion of a woman who intends to be comely and attractive. At fifty, she cultivated a jovial, almost joyous manner, with the top dressing of hearty goodwill and good nature, which disarmed strangers and recent acquaintances. On getting to

know her better, they hastily rearmed themselves. Someone had once aptly described her as a hedgehog with the protective mimicry of a puff ball. If there was an awkward remark to be made at an inconvenient moment before undesired listeners, Joan invariably made it, and when the occasion did not present itself, she was usually capable of creating it. She was not without a certain popularity, the sort of popularity that a dashing highwaymen sometimes achieved among those who were not in

the habit of traveling on his particular highway. A great aunt on her mother's side of the family had married so often that Joan imagined herself justified in claiming cousinship with a large circle of disconnected houses and treating them all on a relationship footing which theoretical kinship enabled her to extract luncheons and other accommodations under the plea of keeping the lamp of family life aglow, I felt I simply had to come to day, She chuckled at Yeovil. I was just dying to see

the return. Of course, I know perfectly well that neither of you want me when you haven't seen each other for so long, and must have heaps and heaps to say to one another. But I thought I would risk the odio of being the third person on an occasion when two a company and three are a nuisance. Wasn't it brave of me? She spoke, in the full knowledge of the fact that the luncheon party would not in any case have been restricted to Yeovil and his wife, Having seen Ronnie arrive in the hall

as she was being shown upstairs. Ronnie's store is coming, I believe, said Cecily. So you're not breaking into a tete a tete Ronnie. I don't count him, said Joan Gaily. He's just a boy who looks nice and meets asparagus. I hear he's getting to play the piamo rarely well such a pity, he will grow fat. Musicians always do, and it will

ruin him. I speak feelingly because I'm gravitating towards plantnus myself. The divine architect turns us out fearfully and wonderfully built, and there is as charming to the eye. And then he adds another chin and two or three extra inches round the waist, and the effect is ruined. Fortunately, you can always find another Ronnie when this one grows fat and uninteresting. The supply of boys who look nice and eat asparagus is unlimited. Hell alone, mister store.

We were all talking about you. Nothing very damaging, I hope, said Ronnie, who had just entered the room. No, we were merely deciding that, whatever you may do with your life, your chin must remain single. When one's chin begins to lead a double life, one's own opportunities for depravity are insensibly narrowed. You needn't tell me that you haven't any hankerings afterpravity.

People with your colored eyes and hair are always depraved. Let me introduce you to my husband, Ronnie, said Cecily, and then let's go and begin lunch. You two must almost feel as if you were honeymooning again, said Joan as they sat down. You must have quite forgotten each other's tastes and peculiarities since you last met. Old Emily Fromley was talking about you yesterday when I mentioned that Mary was expected home. Curious sort of marriage tie,

she said, in that stupid staring way of hers. When husband and wife spend most of their time in different consonans, I don't call it marriage at all, nonsense, I said, it's the best way of doing things. The ovals will be a united and devoted couple long after heaps of their married contemporaries have trundled through the divorce court. I forgot at the moment that her youngest girl had divorced her husband last year, and that her second girl is

rumored to be contemplating a similar step. One can't remember everything. Joan Mardle was remarkable for being able to remember the smallest details in the family lives of two or three hundred acquaintances. From personal matters, she went with a bound to the political or small talk of the moment. The official declaration as to the House of Lords is out at last, she said, I bought a

paper just before coming here, but I left it in the tube. All existing titles at elapse if three successive holders, including the present ones, failed to take the oath of allegiance. Have any taken it up to the present, asked Yobil. Only about nineteen so far, and none of them representing very leading families. Of course, others will come in gradually as the change of dynasty becomes more and more an accepted fact. And of course there will

be lots of new creations to fill up the gaps. I here for certain that Fitherby is to get a title of some sort in recognition of his literary labors. He has written a short history of the House of Hohensalend for use in schools, you know, and he is bringing out a popular life of Frederick the Great, at least he hopes it will be popular. I didn't know that writing was much in his nine, said Yobil me on the occasional

editing of a company prospectus. I understand, and that his historical researches are given every satisfaction in exalted Quarters, said Joan. Something may be lacking in the style, perhaps, but the August approval can make good that defect. With the style of Baron Fitherby has such a kind heart and kind hearts and more than coronets we'll know. But the two go quite well together. And the dear man is not content with his services to literature. He's blossoming forth

as a liberal patron of the arts. He's taken quite a lot of tickets for dear Gauler's debut. Half the second row the chest circle. Do you mean garlum musselford, asked Yobil, catching at the name. What on earth is she having a debut about? What? Cried Joan in loud voiced amazement, haven't you heard? Hasn't Cicily told you? How funny that you shouldn't have heard? Why it's going to be one of the events of the season.

Everybody's talking about it. She's going to do suggestion dancing at the caravans or a theater. Lord heavens, what is suggestion dancing, asked Yobil. Oh, something quite new, explained Joan. At any rate, the name is quite new, and Gaula is new as far as the public had concerned. And that's enough to establish the novelty of the thing. Amongst other things, she does a dance suggesting the life of a fern, I saw one of the rehearsals, and to me it would equally well have suggested the life

of John Wesley. However, it is probably the fault of my imagination. I've either got too much or too little. Anyhow, it's ununderstood thing that she's to take Landon by storm. When I last saw Gaula muscle Vord, observed Yeovil, she was rather serious flapper who thought the world was in urgent need of regeneration, and was not certain whether she would regenerate it or take up miniature painting. I forget which she attempted. Ultimately, she is quite

serious about her art, put in itsily. She has studied a good deal abroad and worked hard at mastering the technique of her profession. She's not at mere Amata with the hankering after the footlights. I fancy she will do well. But what do her people say about it, asked Yovil, who they're simply furious about it, answered Joan. The idea of a daughter of the House of Muscleford prancing and twisting about the stage for Prussian officers and Hamburg Jews,

to Gazette, is a dreadful cup of humiliation for them. It's unfortunate, of course that they should feel so cutely about it, but still one can understand their point of view. I don't see what other point of view they could possibly take, said Yobil sharply. If Galla thinks that the necessities of art or her own inclinations demand that she should dance in public, why can't she do it in Paris or even Vienna. Anywhere would be better,

one would think, than in London under the present conditions. He had given Joan the indication that she was looking for as to his attitude towards the fate of Compli. Without asking a question. She had discovered that husband and wife were divided on the fundamental issue that underlay all others. At the present moment, Cecily was weaving social schemes for the future. Yeovil had come home in a frame of mind that threatened the destruction of those schemes, or at any

rate, a serious hindrance to their execution. The situation presented itself to Joan's mind with an alluring piquanci your giving a grand supper party for Gauler on the night of her Debutan Chiu, She asked Cicily several people spoke to me about it, so I suppose it must be true. Tony Luton and Young Store had taken care to spread the news of the projected supper function in order to

insure against a change of plans on Sicily's part. Gauler is a great friend of mine, said Cecily, trying to talk as if the conversation had taken a perfectly indifferent turn. Also, I think she deserves a little encouragement after the hard work she's been through. I thought it would be doing her a kindness to arrange a supper party for her. On the first night. There was a moment's silence. Jovill said nothing, and Joan understood the value of

being occasionally tongue tied. The whole question is continued Cecily, as the silence became oppressive. Whether one is to mope and hold aloof from the national life or take our share in it. The life has got to go on, whether we participate in it or not. It seems to me to be more patriotic to come down into the dust of the marketplace than to withdraw one's self beyond walls or beyond the seas. Of course, the industrial life of the

country has to go on, said Yovil. No one could criticize Gaula if she interested herself in organizing cottage industries or anything of that sort in which she would be helping her own people. That one could understand. But I don't think that a cosmopolitan can sound the music hall business calls for personal sacrifices from young women of good family at a moment like the present. It's just at a moment like the present, that the people want something to interest them and

take them out of themselves, said Cicily argumentatively. What has happened has happened, and we can't undo it or escape the consequences. What we can do, or attempt to do, is to make things less dreary and make people less unhappy, in a word more contented, said Yeovil. If I were a German statesman, that is the end I would labor for and encourage others

to labor for, to make the people forget that they were discontented. All this work of recalvinizing the social side of London life may be sometime in the phrase that by a poor Laurid Pruf. I don't think there's any use in discussing the matter further, said Cecily. I can see that grand supper party not coming off, said Joan provocatively. Ronnie looked anxiously at Cicily. You can see it coming on if you're gifted with the prophetic vision of a reliable

kind, said Cicily. Of course, as Mary doesn't take kindly to the idea of Gaula's enterprise, I won't have the party here. I'll give it at a restaurant. That's all. I can see Mary's point of view and sympathize with it, but I'm not going to throw Gaula over. There was another pause of uncomfortably protracted duration. I say this is a top hole omelet, said Ronnie. It was his only contribution to the conversation, but it was a valuable one. End of chapter five Chapter six of When William Came

By SARKI this is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot or Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee. Chapter six. Hervon Quarle, her von Karl sat at his favorite table in the Brandenburg Cafe, the new building that made such an imposing show and did such thriving business at the

lower end of what most of its patrons called the Dragenish Thrauser. Though the establishment was new, it had already achieved its unwritten code of customs and the sanctity of hevon Quarle's special reserved table had acquired the authority of a tradition. A set of chessmen, a copy of the Quite Saitung and the Times, and a slim necked bottle of Rhenish wine ice school from the cellar were always to be found there early in the forenoon, and the honored guest for whom

these preparations were made usually arrived on the scene shortly after eleven o'clock. For an hour or so he would read and silently digest the contents of his two newspapers, and then, at the first sign of flagging interest on his part, another of the cafe's regular customers would march across the floor, exchange a word or two on the affairs of the day, and bebidden with a wave

of the hand. Into the opposite seat, a waiter would instantly place the chessboard with its marshaled ranks of combatants in the required position, and the contest would begin here. Von Qual was a heavily built man of mature middle age, of the blonde North German type, with the facial aspect that suggested stupidity

and brutality. The stupidity of his mien masked a nobility and a shrewdness that was distinctly above the average, and the suggestion of brutality was belied by the fact that von Qual was as kind hearted a man as one could meet with in a day's journey. Early in life, almost before he was in his teens, Fritz von Pal had made up his mind to accept the world as it was, and to that philosophical resolution, steadfast he adhered to. He

attributed his excellent digestion and his unruffled happiness. Perhaps he confused cause and effect. The excellent digestion may have been responsible for at least some of the philosophical serenity. He was a bachelor of the type that is called confirmed, and which might better be labeled consecrated. From his early youth onward to his present age, he had never had the faintest flickering intention of marriage, children and

animals he adored. Women and plants he accounted somewhat of a nuisance. A world without women and roses and asparagus would, he admitted, be robbed of much of its charm. But with all their charm, these things were tarsome and thorny and capricious, always wanting to climb or creep in places where they were not wanted, and resolutely drooping and fading away when they were desired to

flourish. Animals, on the other hand, accepted the world as it was and made the best of it. And children, at least nice children, uncontent aminated by grown up influences, lived in worlds of their own making. Von Val held no acknowledged official position in the country of his residence, but it was an open secret that those responsible for the real direction of affairs sought his counsel on nearly every step that they meditated, and that his counsel was

very rarely disregarded. Some of the shrewdest and most successful enactments of the ruling power were believed to have originated in the brain cells of the bovine fronted schamgast of the Brandenburg Cafe. Around the wood paneled walls of the cafe were set at intervals well mounted heads of boar, elk, stag, roebuck, and other game beasts of a northern forest, while in between were carved armorial escutcheons of the principal cities of the lately expanded realm Magdeburg, Manchester, Hamburg,

Bremen, Bristol, and so forth. Below these came shelves, on which stood a wonderful array of stone beer mugs, each decorated with some fantastic device or motto, and most of them pertaining individually and sacredly to some regular and

unfailing customer. In one particular corner of the highest shelf, greatly at his ease and in no wise to be disturbed, slept vhoton the huge gray house cat, dreaming doubtless of certain nimble and audacious mice down in the cellar three floors below, whose nimbleness and audacity were as precious to him as the forwardness

of the birds is to a skilled gun on a grouse moor. Once every day, Foton came marching in stately fashion across the polished floor, halted midway to resume an unfinished toilet operation, and then proceeded to pay his leisurely respects to his friend von Quar. The latter was said to be prouder of this

daily demonstration of esteem than of his many coveted orders of merit. Several of his friends and acquaintances shared with him the distinction of having achieved the black Eagle, but not one of them had ever succeeded in obtain the slightest recognition of their existence from Votan. The daily greeting had been exchanged, and the proud

gray beast had marched away to the music of a slumbrous purr. The kreuz Zeitung and the Times underwent a final scrutiny and were pushed aside, and von far gazed aimlessly out of the July sunshine bathing the walls and windows of the Piccadilly Hotel. Er Rebinoch, the plump little Pomeranian banker, stepped across the floor almost as noiselessly as Voton had done, though with considerably less grace, and some half a minute later was engaged in sliding pawns and knights and bishops

to and fro on the chessboard in a series of lightning moves. Bewildering to look on. Neither he nor his opponent played with the skill that they severally brought to bear on banking and stake craft, nor did they conduct their game

with the politeness that they punctiliously observed in other affairs of life. A running fire of contemptuous remarks and aggressive that are accompanied each move, and the mere record of the conversation would have given an uninitiated onlooker the puzzling impression that an easy and crushing victory was assured to both players. He has puzzled two men. He doesn't know what to do. He thinks he would have moved there? Does he much good that you'll do him? Never have I seen such

a mess as he is in. He cannot do anything. He is absolutely helpless. Oh you'll take my bishop? Do you much? I care for that? Nothing? See? I give you a check? H No, he isn't a fright. He doesn't know where to go. What a mess

is it? So the game proceeded with a brisk exchange of pieces and incivilities, and the fluctuation of fortunes, till the little banker lost his queen as a result of an incautious move, and after several woebegone contortions of his shoulders and hands declined further contest a sleek hair Piccolo rushed forward to remove the board and the erstwhile combatants resumed the courteous dignity that they discarded in their chess playing

moments. If your sins are Gamania today, asked Harry Ebenoch, as soon as the boy had receded to a respectful distance, No, said von Quar. Anniversy to Gammania. A count on you to tell me if there is anything noteworthy in it. It has an article today headed occupation or assimilation, said the banker. It is of some importance and very written. It is

very pessimistic. Catholic papers are always pessimistic about things of this world, said von Quar, just as they are unduly optimistic of all things of the next world. What line does it take? It's thus that our conquest of written can only result in a temporary patient whether notice to quit. Always hanging over our heads is that we can never hope to assimilate the people of these islands in our empire as a sort of married time saxony of Bavaria or the teaching

of history is against it. Saxony in Bavaria are part of the Empire because of their past history. England is being bound into the Empire in spite of her past history, and so forth. The writer of the article has not studied history very deeply, said von qual. The impossible thing that he speaks off has been done before, done in these very islands too. The Norman conquest became an assimilation in comparatively fuel generation. Ah. In those days,

yes, said the banker, But the conditions were altogether different. There was not a rapid transmission of news in the means of keeping the public mind instructed in what was happening. In fact, one can scarcely say that the public man was there to instruct. There was not the same bond of brotherhood between men of the same nation that exists now. Northumberland was almost as fall into

Devon or Kent as Normandy was in the church. In those dates was a great international factor in the crusades, bound men together fighting under one leader for a common cause. Also, there was not a great national past to be forgotten is in this case. There are many factors certainly that are against us, conceded the statesman. But you must also take into account of those that

will help us. In most cases in recent history, where the conquered have stood out against all attempts at dissimulation, there has been a religious difference to enter the racial one Lake Poland, for instance, and the Catholic parts of Ireland. If the Bretons ever seriously begin to assert their nationality as against the Fridge, it will be because he have remained more Catholic in practice and sentiment

of their neighbors. Here there is no such complication. We are, in the bout a Protestant nation with a Catholic minority, and the same may be said of the British. Then in modern days there is the alchemy of sport and the drama to bring men of different races amicably together. One or two sportsmen like Germans in a London football team will do more to break down racial antagonism than anything the governments or councils can effect. As for the state,

it had long been international in his tendencies. You can see that every day the banker nodded his head. London is not our greatest difficulty, continued vonk Val. You must remember the steady influx of Germans since the War Old districts are changing the complexion of their inhabitants, and in some streets you might almost fancy yourself in a German town. We can scarcely hope to make much impression

on the country districts and the provincial towns at present. But you must remember the thousands and thousands of the more virile and restless old men have emigrated, and thousands more will follow their example. We shall fill up their places with our own surplus population, as the Teuton race is colonized England in the old

pre Christian days. Let is better is it not to people the fat meadows of the Thames Valley and the healthy downs and uplands of Sussex and the Berkshire, than to go hunting the elbow room among the flies and fevers of the tropics. We have somewhere to go to now, better than the scrub and the belts and the thorn jungles. Of course, of course, assented her Raybinoch. But why this desirable process of infiltration and assimilation goes on? How

are you going to provide against the hostility of a concarnation. A people is a right tradition behind them, and a ruling instinct strongly developed. What sees her eyes closed and hands folded while you carry on the process of Germanization?

What will keep them quiet? The hopelessness of the situation. For Saint Jury's Boyton has ruled the seas and been able to dictator half the world in consequence, then she let slip the mastery of the seas of something too costly own earth to keep up, something which allows too much jealousy and uneasiness in others. And now the Seese rule her avo you wave that breaks on her shore

rattles the keys of her prison. I'm no fire e to her, I binock, but I confess that when I am at Dover or Southampton and see those dark blots on the sea, and those great specks in the sky, our battleships and cruises and the aircraft, and realize what they mean to us, our heartbeats just a little quaker. If every German was flung out of England tomorrow, in three weeks time, we shall be coming in again on our own terms. With our sea scouts and the air scouts spread in organized

network around, not a shipload of food staff could reach the country. They know that they can calculate how many days of independence since starvation they could endure, and they will make no attempt to bring about such a certain fiasco. Brave men fight for it for lown hope, but the babies do not fight for an issue they know to be hopeless, so said Herr Rebinock. As things are at present, they can do nothing from within, absolutely nothing be

away all that before. But as the Germania points out, there is another Briton beyond the seas. Supposing the Court a Deli were to engineer league in league, a league with whom interrupted the statesman Russia, we could watch and ruled. We are rather nearer to its western frontier and Delis, and we could sortle its multi trade at five thousand notice Swan Sat Holland or not inclined to provoke our hostility. They would have everything to lose by such a course.

There are other forces in the world that might be reined against us, argued the banker, The United States, Japan, Italy, They all have navies. Does the teaching of history show you that it is a strong power, armed and ready, that has to suffer from the hostility of the world, asked von quar As far as the sentiment goes, perhaps, but not in practice. The danger has always been for the weak, dismembered nation.

Think you, for a moment, as the enfeebled, scattered British embower oversees no undefended territories that our attemptation to earn neighbors as you pan, nothing to glean. Where we have harvested are the known North American positions which might slip into other keeping as Russia herself. No traditional temptations beyond the Oxus find you. We are not making the misdag Napoleon made any forced all Europe to before him or against him. We reaten no world aggressions. We all satisfied where

he was insatiable. We have cast down one overshadowing power from the face of the world because it stood in our way. But we have made no attempt to spread our branches all over the space that he's cover'd. We have not tried to set up a tributary Canadian Republic or to partitions out Africa. We have dreamed no dream of making ourselves lords of Hindustan. On the contrary,

we have given proof of our friendly intentions towards our neighbors. We backed France up the aster day in her squabble with Swain over the Moroccan boundaries, and proclaimed our opinion that the Republic houses indisputable omission on the North African coast, as we have in the North Sea. That is not the action or the language of aggression. No, continued Banquar, after a moment's silence. The world may fear us and dislike us, but for the present, at any

rate, there will be no leagues against us. No, there is one rock on which our attempt, at our simulation will found her or fine firm anchorage, And that is the use of the country. The generation that is at the threshold. Now it is them that we must capture. We must teach them to learn and coax them to forget. In course of time, Anglo Saxon may blend with German, as the Elder Saxons and the Bavarians and the Shavians have blended with the Prussians into a loyal united people under the Septo

of the Horns Lands. Then we should be doubly strong Roman Carthage rolled into one, an empire of the West greater than Shalla Mine ever knew. Then we could look slav and Latin and asiatic in the face, and keep our place as a central dominant force of their civilized world. The speaker paused for a moment and drank a deep draft of wine, as though he were invoking the prosperity of that future world power. Then he resumed in a more level

tone. On the other hand, the younger generation of Britons may grow up in hereditary hatred, repulsing all our overtures, forgetting nothing and forgiving nothing. Wait and watching for the time when some weakness assails us, when some crisis entangles us, when we cannot be everywhere at once, then our work will be imperialed, perhaps and done. There lies the danger. There lies the

hope the younger generation. There is another danger, said the banker, after he had pondered over Bonquarle's remarks for a moment or two, amid the incense clouds of a fat cigar, A danger, as at I foresee in the immediate future. Perhaps not so much a danger as an element of exasperation, which may ultimately defeat your plans. The law as to military service will have

to be promulgated shortly, ones that cannot fail to be bitterly unpopular. The people of these islands will have to be brought into line with the rest of the Empire in the matter of military training and military service. Now will they like that we're not the enforcing of such a measure infuriatum against us? Remember, they have made great sacrifices to avoid the burton of military service. Do your got exclaimed her v unclar whn't you say you have made sacrifices on their

altar? End of chapter six Chapter seven of When William Came by Sarkee. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came by Sarkee Chapter seven the lure Sicily had successfully insisted did on having her own way concerning the projected supper party. Yovil had said nothing further in opposition to it, whatever his feelings on the subject might

be. Having gained her point, however, she was anxious to give her husband the impression of having been consulted, and to put her victory as far as possible on the footing of a compromise. It was also rather a relief to be able to discuss the matter out of range of Jones's disconcerting tongue and

observant eyes. I hope you're not really annoyed about this silly supper party, she said, on the morning before the much talked of first night, and had pledged myself to give it, so I couldn't back out without seeming mean to Gaula. And in any case it would have been impolitic to cry off. Why impolitic, asked Yovil coldly. It would give a fence in quarters where I don't want to give a fence, said Cecily, In quarters where the fate of Conti is an object of solicitude, said Yeovil. Look here,

said Cecily, in her most disarming manner. It's just as well to be perfectly frank about the whole matter. If one wants to live in the London of the present day, one must make up one's mind to accept the fatter compli with as good a grace as possible. I do want to live in London, and I don't want to change my way of living and start under different conditions in some other place. I can't face the prospect of tearing up my life by the roots. I feel certain I shouldn't bear transplanting.

I can't imagine myself recreating my circle of interests in some foreign town or colonial center, or even in a country town in England, India. I couldn't stand. London is not merely a home to me. It's a world, and it happens to be just the world that suits me, and that I'm suited to. The German occupation or whatever one likes to call it, is a calamity, but it's not like a molten deluge from Vesuvius that needs send

us all all scuttling away from another Pompeii. Of course, she added, there are things that jarre horribly on one, even when one has got more or less accustomed to them. But one must just learn to be philosophical and bear them, supposing they're not bearable, said Yeovil. During the few days that I've been in the land, I've seen things that I cannot imagine will ever be bearable. That is because they're new to you, said Cecily.

I don't wish that they should ever come to seem bearable, retorted Yovil. I've been bred and reared as a unit of a ruling race. I don't want to find myself settling down resignedly as a member of an enslaved one. There's no need to make things out worse than they are protested Cecily. We've had a military disaster on a big scale, and there's been a great political

dislocation in consequence. But there's no reason why everything shouldn't right itself in time, as it has done after other similar disasters in the history of nations. We are not scattered to the winds or wiped off the face of the earth. We are still an important racial unit, our racial unit in a foreign empire, commented Yeovil. We may arrive at the position of being the dominant factor in that empire, said Cecily, impressing our national characteristics on it and

perhaps dictating its dynastic future and a whole trend of its policy. Such things have happened in history. Or we may become strong enough to throw off the foreign connection at a moment when it can be done effectually and advantageously. But meanwhile, it is necessary to preserve our industrial life and our social life, and for that reason we must accommodate ourselves to present circumstances, however distasteful they

may be. Immigration to some colonial wilderness, or holding ourselves rigidly aloof from the life of the capital won't help matters, really, Bury. If you will think things over a bit, you will see that the course I am following is the one dictated by sane patriotism, whom the gods wish to render harmless. They first a fit with sanity, said Yovil bitterly. You may be content to wait for a hundred years or so for this national revival to

creep and crawl us back into a semblance of independence and world importance. I'm afraid I haven't the patience or the philosophy to sit down comfortably and wait for a change of fortune that won't come in my time, if it comes at all. Cecily changed the drift of the conversation. She had only introduced the argument for the purpose of defining her point of view and accustoming Yovil to it. As one leads a nervous horse up to an unfamiliar barrier that he is

required eventually to jump. In any case, she said, from the immediately practical standpoint, in England is the best place for you till you've shaken off all traces of that fever. Pass the time away somehow till the hunting begins, and then go down to the East Wessex country. They're looking out for a new master after this season, and if you were strong enough you might take it on for a while. You could go to Norway for fishing in

the summer and hunt the East Wessex in the winter. I'll come down and do a bit of hunting two and we'll have house parties and get a little golf in between miles. It will be like old times. Yeovil looked at his wife and laughed her was an old fellow who used to hunt his hounds regularly throughout the fiercest times of the Great Civil War. There's a picture of

him by Caton Woodville. I think, leading his pack between King Charles his army and the parliament forces, just as some battle was going to begin. I've often thought that the King must have disliked him rather more than he disliked the men who were in arms against him. They at lea cared one way or the other. I fancy that old chat would have a great many imitators

nowadays, though when it comes to question of sport against soldiering. I don't know whether anyone has said it, but one might almost assert that the German victory was one on the golf links of Bittan. I don't see why you should saddle one particular form of sport with the special responsibility protested Cicily. Of course, not, said Jovil, except that it absorbed perhaps more of the energy and attention of the leisured class than other sports did. And in this

country the leisured class was the only bulwark we had against sufficial indifference. The working classes had a big share of the apathy, and indirectly a greater share of the responsibility, because the voting power was in their hands. They had not the leisure, however, to sit down and think clearly what the danger was. Their own industrial warfare was more real to them than anything that was threatening from the nation that they only knew from samples of German clerks and German

waiters. In any case, said Cecily. As regards the hunting, there is no civil war or national war raging just now, and there is no immediate likelihood of one. A good many hunting seasons will have to come and go before we can think of a war of independence as even a distant possibility, and in the meantime, hunting and horse breeding and country sports generally are

the things most likely to keep Englishmen together on the land. That's why so many men who hate the German occupation are trying to keep field sports alive and in the right hands. However, I won't go on arguing you and I always think things out for ourselves and decide for ourselves, which is much the best in the long run. Cecily slipped away to her writing room to make final arrangements over the telephone for the all important supper party, leaving Yeovil's turn

over in his mind the suggestion that she had thrown out. It was an obvious lure, a lure to draw him away from the fret and fury that possessed him so inconveniently, but its obvious nature did not detract from its effectiveness.

Yeovil had pleasant recollections of the East Wessex, a cheery little hunt that afforded good sport in an unpretentious manner, A joyous thread of life running through a rather sleepy countryside, like a merry brook careering through a placid valley for a man coming slowly and yet eagerly backed to the activities of life from the weariness of a long fever. The prospect of a leisurely season with the East Wessex was singularly attractive, and side by side with its attractiveness, there was

a tempting argument in favor of yielding to its attractions. Among the small squires and yeoman farmers, doctors, country tradesmen, auction years and so forth, who would gather at the covert side and at the hunt breakfasts, there might be a local nucleus of revolt against the enslavement of the land, a discouraged and leaderless band waiting for some one to mold their resistance into effective shape and keep their loyalty to the old dynasty in the old national cause steadily burning.

Yovil could see himself taking up that position, stimulating the spirit of hostility to the fatal compli organizing stubborn opposition to every germanizing influence that was brought into play, schooling the youth of the countryside to look steadily deliwood. That was the bait that Yovil threw out to his conscience, while slowly considering the other bait

that was appealing so strongly to his senses. The dry, warm scent of the stable, the nip of the morning air, the pleasant squelch squelch of the saddle leather, the moist, earthy fragrance of the autumn woods and wet fallows, the cold white mists of winter days, the whimper of hounds, and the hot, restless pushing of the pack through ditch and hedgerow and undergrowth. The birds that flew up and clucked and chattered as you passed, The

hearty greeting and pleasant gossip in farmhouse kitchens and market day bar parlors. All these remembered delights of the chase marshaled themselves in the brain and made a cumulative appeal that came with special intensity to a man who was a little tired of his wanderings, more than a little drawn away from the jarring centers of life. The hot London sunshine, baking the sook grind walls, and the ugly, incessant hoot and grunt of the motor traffic gave an added charm to the

vision of hill and hollow and copse that flickered in Jovill's mind. Slowly, with the sensuous lingering over detail, his imagination carried him down to a small, sleepy yet with all pleasantly bustling market town, and placed him unerringly in a wide, straw littered yard, half full of men and quarter full of horses, with a bob tailed sheep dog or two, trying not to get

in everybody's way, but insisting on being in the thicker things. The horses gradually detached themselves from the proud of unimportant men, and came one by one into momentary prominence, to be discussed and appraised for their good points and bad points, and finally to be bid for. And always there was one horse that detached itself conspicuously from the rest the ideal hunter, or at any rate, Yeoville's ideal of the ideal hunter. Mentally, it was put through its

paces before him, its pedigree and brief history recounted to him. Mentally, he saw a stable lad put it over a jump or two, with credit to all concerned, and inevitably he saw himself outbidding less discerning rivals, and securing the desired piece of horse flesh to be the chief glory and mainstay of his hunting stable, to carry him well and truly and cleverly through many a

joyous long to be remembered run. That scene had been one of the recurring half waking dreams of his long days of weakness in the far away finished nursing home, a dream sometimes of tantalizing mockery, sometimes of pleasure, in the foretaste of a joy to come. And now it need scarcely be a dream any longer. He had only to go down at the right moment and take

an actual part in his oft rehearsed vision. Everything would be there exactly as his imagination had placed it, even down to the bob tailed sheep dogs. The horse of his imagining would be there waiting for him, or, if not absolutely the ideal animal, something very like it. He might even go beyond the limits of his dream and pick up a couple of desirable animals. Nor would probably be fewer purchasers for good class hunters in these days than of

yore. And with the coming of this reflection, his dream faded suddenly, and his mind came back with a throb of pain to the things he had for the moment forgotten. The weary hateful things that were symbolized for him by the standard that floated yellow and black over the frontage of Buckingham Palace. Jovial wandered down to his snuggery, a mood of listless dejectioning him. He fidgeted aimlessly with one or two books and papers, filled the pipe, and half

filled the waste paper basket with torn circulars and accumulating writing table litter. Then he lit the pipe and settled down in his most comfortable armchair with an old notebook in his hand. It was a sort of disjointed diary, running fitfully through the winter months of some past years, and recording noteworthy days with the East Wessex and over the telephone. Cecily talked and arranged and consulted with men and women to whom the joys of a good gallop or the love of a

stricken fatherland were as letters in an unknown alphabet. End of chapter seven Chapter eight of When William Came by Sake. This is a libri box recording. All LibriVox audings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to librovox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William came

by Sarkee Chapter eight. The first night, huge posters outside the Caravansary Theater of Varieties announced the first performance of the uniquely interesting Suggestion Dances, interpreted by the Honorable Gaula musselford An impressionist portrait of a rather severe looking young woman gave the public some idea of what the dancers might be like in appearance, and the further information was added that her performance was the greatest dramatic event of the

season. Yet another piece of information was conveyed to the public a few minutes after the doors had opened, in the shape of large notices bearing the brief announcement house full for the first night function. Most of the had been reserved for specially invited guests or else bespoken by those who considered it due to their own importance to be visible on such an occasion. Even at the commencement of the ordinary program of the evening, Gaula was not due to appear till late

in the list. The theater was crowded with the throng of chattering, expectant human beings. It seemed as though everyone had come early to see everyone else arrive. As a matter of fact, it was the rumor heralded arrival of one personage in particular, that had drawn people early to their seats and given a double edge to the expectancy of the moment. At first sight and first

hearing. The bulk of the audience seemed to comprise representatives of the chief European races in well distributed proportions, but if one gave it closer consideration, it

could be seen that the distribution was geographically rather than ethnographically diversified. Men and women there were from Paris, Munich, Rome, Moscow and Vienna, from Sweden and Holland, and divers other cities and countries, but in the majority of cases the Jordan Valley had supplied their forefathers with the common cradle ground.

The lack of a fire burning on a national altar seemed to have drawn them by universal impulse to the congenial flare of the footlights, Whether as artists, producers, impresarios, critics, agents, go betweens, or merely as highly intelligent and fearsomely well informed spectators, they were prominent in the chief seats.

They were represented more sparsely, but still in fair numbers in the cheaper places, and everywhere there were voluble lymphatic, sanguine or skeptical, prodigal of word and gesture, with eyes that seemed to miss nothing and acknowledge nothing, and a general restless dread of not being seen and noticed. Of the theater going

London public. There was also a fair muster, more particularly centered in the less expensive parts of the house, while in boxes, stalls and circles a sprinkling of military uniform gave an unfamiliar tone to the scene in the eyes of those who had not previously witnessed a first night performance under the new conditions. Yeoville, while standing aloof from his wife's participation in this social event, had made private arrangements for being a personal spectator of the scene. As one of

the ticket buying public. He had secured a seat in the back rove, a low price gallery, whence he might watch, observant and unobserved the much talked of debut of Gaula Musselford and the writing of a new chapter in the history of the Fete compli. Around him, he noticed an incessant undercurrent of jangling laughter, an unending give and take of meaningless mirthless jest and catchword.

He had noticed the same thing in streets and public places since his arrival in London, a noisy, empty interchange of chaff and laughter that he had been at a loss to account for. The Londoner is not well adapted for the irresponsible noisiness of jesting tongue that bubbles up naturally in a Southern race. And the effort to be volatile was the more noticeable because it so obviously was an

effort. Turning over the pages of a book that told the story of Bulgarian social life in the days of Turkish rule, the oval had that morning come across a passage that seemed to throw some light on the thing that had puzzled him. Bondage has this one advantage. It makes a nation merry where far reaching ambition has no scope for its development. The community squanders its energy on the trivial and personal cares of its daily life, and seeks relief and recreation

in simple and easily obtained material enjoyment. The writer was a man who had known bondage, so he spoke at any rate with authority of the London of the moment. It could not, however, be said with any truth that it was merry, but merely that its inhabitants made desperate endeavor not to appear

crushed under their catastrophe. Surrounded as he was now with a babble of tongues and shrill mechanical party, Jovill's mind went back to the book and its account of a theater audience in the Turkish days of Bulgaria, with its light and laughing crowd of critics and spectators. Bulgaria, the thought of that determined little nation came to him with a sharp sense of irony. There was a people who had not thought it beneath the dignity of their manhood to learn the trade

and discipline of arms. They had their reward torn and exhausted, and debt encumbered from their campaigns. They were masters in their own house. The Bulgarian flag threw over the Bulgarian mountains, and Yeovil stole a glance at the crown of Charlemagne set over the royal box in a capacious box immediately opposite the one set aside for royalty. But Lady Shalam sat in well considered prominence, confident that every press critic and reporter would note her presence, and that one or

two of them would describe or misdescribe her toilet. Already, quite a considerable section of the audience knew her by name, and the frequency with which she graciously nodded towards various quarters of the house suggested the presence of a great many personal acquaintances. She had attained to that desirable feminine altitude of person position when people who go about everywhere know you well by sight and have never met your

dress before. Lady Shaylam was a woman of commanding presence, of that type which suggests to consciousness that the command may not necessarily be obeyed. She had observant eyes and a well managed voice. Her successes in life had been worked for, but they were also, to some considerable extent the result of accident. Her public history went back to the time when, in the person of her husband, mister Conrad Daught, she had contested too hopeless and very expensive

parliamentary elections on behalf of her party. On each occasion, the declaration of the poll had shown a heavy though reduced majority on the wrong side. But she might have perpetrated an apt misquotation of the French monarch's traditional message. After

the defeat of Pavia and assured the world all is lost save honors. The forthcoming honors list had duly proclaimed the fact that Conrad d'ort esquire had entered Parliament by another door, as Baron Shalamb of Wireskilne in the County of Suffolk. Success had crowned the lady's efforts as far as the achievement of the title went, but her social ambitions seemed unlikely to make further headway. The new baron

and his wife. Their title and money, notwithstanding, did not go down in their particular segment of county's society, and in London there were other titles and incomes to compete with. People were willing to worship the Golden Calf, but allowed themselves a choice of altars. No one could justly say that the Shalambs were either oppressively vulgar or insufferably bumptuous. Probably the chief reason for their

lack of popularity was their intense and obvious desire to be popular. They kept open house in such an insistently open manner that they created a social draft. The people who accepted their invitations for the second or third time were not the sort of people whose names gave importance to a dinner party or a house gathering. Failure in a thinly disguised form attended the assiduous efforts of the Shalembs to

play a leading role in the world that they had climbed into. The Baron began to observe to his acquaintances that gadding about and entertaining on a big scale was not much in his line. A quiet after dinner pipe and talk with some brother legislator was his ideal way of spending an evening. Then came the great catastrophe involving the old order of society in the national overthrow. Lady Shalem, after a decent interval of patriotic mourning, began to look around her and

take stock of her chances and opportunities. Under the new regime. It was easier to achieve distinction as a titled oasis in the social desert that London had become than it had been to obtain recognition as a new growth in a rather overcrowded field. The observant eyes and agile brain quickly noted this circumstance, and her ladyship set to work to adapt herself to the altered conditions that governed her world. Lord Shalem was one of the few peers who kissed the hand of

the new sovereign. His wife was one of the few hostesses who attempted to throw a semblance of gaiety and lavish elegance over the travesty of a London season following the year of the disaster. The world of tradesmen and purveyors and caterers, and the thousands who were dependent on them for employment, privately blessed the example set by Shalem House, whatever their feelings might be towards the fate.

Compli and the august newcomer, who had added an old Saxon kingdom and some of its accretions to the Teutonic realm of Charlemagne, was duly beholden to an acquired subject who was willing to forget the bitterness of defeat eat and to help others to forget it. Also, among other acts of imperial recognition, an earldom was being held in readiness for the baron, who had known how to

accept accomplished facts with a good grace. One of the wits of the Coquetrice Club had asserted that the new Earl would take us supporters for his coat of arms. A lion and a unicorn oubliers. In the box with Lady Shalam was the Griffin von Tolb, a well dressed woman of some fifty six years, comfortable and placid in appearance, yet alert withal rather suggesting a thoroughly wide awake dormouse. Rich, amiable, and intelligent were the adjectives which would have

best described her character and her life story. In her own rather difficult social circle at Paderborne, she had earned for herself the reputation of being one of the most tactful and discerning hostesses in Germany, and it was generally suspected that she had come over and taken up her residence in London in response to a

wish expressed in High Quarters. The lavish hospitality which she dispensed at her house in Barcley Square was a considerable reinforcement to the stricken social life of the metropolis. In a neighboring box, Cicily Yoville presided over a large and lively party, which of course included Ronnie Store, who was for once in a way in a chattering mood, and also included an American dowager who had never been

known to be in anything else. A tone of literary distinction was imparted to the group by the presence of Augustus Smith, better known under her pen name of Rhapsody Pantril, author of a play that had a limited but well advertised success in Sheffield and the United States of America. Author also of a book of reminiscences entitled Things I Cannot Forget. She had beautiful eyes, a knowledge of how to dress, and a pleasant disposition, cankered just a little by

perpetual dread of the non recognition of her genius. As the woman Augustus Myth, she probably would have been unreservedly happy. As the superwoman Rhapsody Pantril, she lived within the border line of discontent. Her most ordinary remarks were framed with the view of arresting attention. Some one once said of her that she ordered a sack of potatoes with the air of one who is making inquiry for a love filter. Do you see what color the curtain is, she asked

Cecily, throwing a note of intense meaning into her question. Cecily turned quickly and looked at the drop curtain. Rather a nice blue, she said, Alexandrine blue, my color, the color of hope, said rhapsody. Impressively. He goes well with the general color scheme, said Cecily, feeling that she was hardly rising to the occasion. Say is it really true that his

majesty is coming, asked the lively American Dowager. I put on my newest frock and my best diamonds on purpose, and should be modified to death if he doesn't see them there, pouted Ronnie. I felt certain you'd put them on for me. Why no, I should have put on rubies and orange opals for you. People with our color of hair always like barbaric display. They don't, said Ronnie. They have chaste, cold tastes. You're absolutely mistaken. Well, I think I ought to know, protested the Dowger.

I've lived longer in the world than you have. Anyway, yes, said Ronnie with devastating truthfulness. But my hair has been this color longer than yours has. Peace was restored by the opportune arrival of a middle aged man of blond North German type with an expression of brutality on his rather stupid face, who sat in the front of the box for a few minutes on a visit

of ceremony to sicily. His appearance caused a slight buzz of recognition among the audience, and if Yoval had cared to make inquiry of his neighbors, he might have learned that this decorated and obviously important personage was the redoubtable von Caval, artificer and shaper of much of the state craft for which other men got the public credit. The orchestra played a selection from The Gondola Girl, which

was the leading musical comedy of the moment. Most of the audience, those in the more expensive seats at any rate, heard the same airs two or three times daily at restaurant lanches, teas, dinners and suppers, and occasionally in the park. They were justified therefore in treating the music as a background to slightly louder conversation than they had hitherto indulged in. The music came to

an end. Episode number two in the evening's entertainment was signaled. The curtain of Alexandrine Blue rolled heavily upward, and a troop of performing wolves was presented to the public. Yeoville had encountered wolves in North Africa deserts and in Siberian forest and wold. He had seen them at twilight, stealing like dark shadows across the snow, and heard their long whimpering howl in the darkness amid the

pines. He could well understand how a magic law had grown up round them through the ages among peoples of four continents, how their name had passed into a hundred strange sayings and inspired a hundred traditions. And now he saw them ride round the stage on tricycles, with grotesque ruffles round their necks and clown caps on their heads, their eyes blinking miserably in the blaze of the footlights. In response to the applause of the house, a stout, atrociously smiling

man in evening dress came forward and bowed. He had had nothing to do either with the capture or the training of the animals, having brought them ready for use from a continental emporium where wild beasts were prepared for the music hall market. But he continued bowing and smiling till the curtain fell. Two American musicians, with comic tendencies denoted by the elaborate rags and tatters of their costumes,

succeeded the wolves. Their musical performance was not without merit, but their comic business seemed to have been invented long ago by some man who had patented a monopoly of all music, hall humor, and forthwith retired from the trade. Some day Yovil reflected the rights of the monopoly might expire a new business become available for the knock about profession. The audience brightened considerably when item number five of the program was signaled. The orchestra struck up a rollicking measure,

and Tony Luton made his entrance amid a rousing storm of applause. He was dressed as an errand boy of some west end shop, with a livery and a box tricycle, as spruce and decorative as the most ambitious errand boy could see himself in his most ambitious dreams. His song was a lively and very audacious chronicle of life behind the scenes in a big retail establishment, and sparkled

with allusions which might fitly have been described as suggestive. At any rate, they appeared to suggest meanings to the audience quite as clearly as Gaula Musseleford's dances were likely to do, even with the aid in her case of long explanations on the programs. When the final verse seemed about to reach an unpardonable climax, a stage policeman opportunely appeared and moved the lively songster on for obstructing the

imaginary traffic of an imaginary Bond Street. The house received the new number with genial enthusiasm and mingled its applause with demands for an earlier favorite. The orchestra struck up the familiar air, and in a few moments the smart errand boy transformed now into a smart jockey, was singing. They quaffed the gay Bubbley

in Eccleston Square to an audience that hummed and nodded its unstinted approval. The next number but one was the Gaulla Musseleford debut, and the house settled itself down to yawn and fidget and chatter for ten or twelve minutes, while the troop of talented Japanese jugg theers performed artistic and quite uninteresting marvels with fans and butterflies and lacquer boxes. The interval of waiting was not destined, however,

to be without its interest. In its way, it provided the one really important and dramatic moment of the evening, one or two uniforms and eving toilettes had already made their appearance in the Imperial Box now, though was observable in that quarter a slight commotion, an unobtrusive reshuffling and reseating, and then every eye in the suddenly quiet, semi darkened house focused itself on one figure.

There was no public demonstration from the newly loyal it had been particularly wished that there should be none, but a ripple of whisper went through the vast audience from end to end. Majesty had arrived. The Japanese Marvel workers went through their display with even less attention than before. Lady Shalam, sitting well in front of her box, lowered her observant eyes to her program and her massive bangles. The evidence of her triumph did not need staring. At end of

chapter eight chapter nine of When William Came By Sakie. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sakie Chapter nine, an evening to be remembered. To the uninitiated or unappreciative, the dancing of Gaula Musselvord did not seem widely different from much that had been exhibited aforetime by exponents of the posturing school. She was

not naturally graceful of movement. She had not undergone years of arduous tutelage. She had not the instinct for sheered joyous energy of action that is stored in some natures. Out of these unpromising negative qualities, she had produced a style of dancing that might best be labeled a conscientious departure from accepted methods. The highly imaginative titles that she had bestowed on her dances, The Life of a Fern, The Sole Dream of a Topaz, and so forth, at least

gave her audience and her critics something to talk about. In themselves, they meant absolutely nothing, but they induced discussion, and that to Gaula meant a great deal. It was a season of dearth and emptiness in the footlights and box office world, and her performance received a welcome that would scarcely have befallen

it in a more crowded and prosperous day. Her success, indeed had been waiting for her ready maid as far as the managerial profession was concerned, and nothing had been left undone in the way of advertisement to secure for it the appearance at any rate of popular favor and loud above the interested applause of those who had personal or business motives for reclaiming a success swelled the exaggerated enthusiasm of

the fairly numerous art satellites, who are unstinted in their praise of anything that they are certain they cannot understand, whatever might be the subsequent verdict of the theater filling public. The majority of the favored first night audience was determined to set the seal of its approval on the suggestion dances, and a steady roll of applause greeted the conclusion of each item. The dancer gravely bowed her thanks

in marked contradistinction to the gentleman who had presented the performing wolves. She did not permit herself the luxury of a smile. It teaches us a great deal, said Rhapsody Pantrill, vaguely but impressively, after the Fern dance had been given and applauded at any rate. We know now that a fern takes life very seriously, broke in Joan Mardle, who had somehow wriggled herself into Sicily's

box. As Yovil, from the back of his gallery watched Gaula running and ricocheting about the stage, looking rather like a wagtail in energetic pursuit of invisible gnats and midges, he wondered how many of the middle aged women who were eagerly applauding her would have taken the least notice of similar gymnastics on the part of their offspring in nursery or garden, beyond perhaps asking them not to make

so much noise. And a bitterer Tinge came to his thoughts as he saw the bouquets being handed up, thoughts of the brave old dowager down at Torywood, the woman who had worked and wrought so hard and so unsparingly in her day for the well being of the state, the state that had fallen helpless into alien hands before her tired eyes. Her eldest son lived invalid wise in the south of France. Her second son lay fathoms deep in the sea with

the hulk of a broken battleship for a burial vault. And now the granddaughter was standing here in the limelight, bowing her thanks for the patronage and favor meted out to her by this cosmopolitan company, with its lavish sprinkling of the uniforms of an alien army. Prominent among the flowers at her feet was one large golden petalled bouquet of gorgeous blooms, tied with a broad streamer of golden

ribband. The tribute rendered by Caesar to the things that were Caesar's. The new chapter of the Fata comply had been written that night, and written well. The audience poured slowly out with the triumphant music of Jancovius's Kaiser Wilhelm March, played by the orchestra, as a happy inspiration peeling in its ears. It has been a great evening, a most successful evening, said Lady Shaylamb to her van Quar, whom she was conveying in her electric broom, to

sicily Yeovil's supper party. An important evening, she added, choosing her adjectives with deliberation. It should give pleasure in high quarters, should it not, And she turned her observant eyes on the impassive face of her companion. Gracious lady, he replied with deliberation and meaning, it has given pleasure. It is an evening to be remembered. The gracious lady suppressed a sigh of satisfaction. Memory in high places was the thing fruitful and precious, beyond computation.

Cicily's party at the Porphiry restaurant had grown to imposing dimensions. Every one whom she asked had come, and so had Johan Mardle. Lady Shalam had suggested several names at the last moment, and there was quite a strong infusion of the Teutonic military and official world. It was just as well, Cicily reflected that the upper was being given at a restaurant and not in Barkshire Street.

Quite left all times, purred the beaming proprietor in Cicily's ear. As the staircase and cloak rooms filled up with a jostling, laughing throng, the guests settled themselves at four tables, taking their places where chance or fancy led them,

latecomers having to fit in wherever they could find room. A babel of tongues in various languages reigned round the tables, amid which the rattle of knives and forks and plates, and the popping of corks made a subdued hubbub Galla musselford the motive for all this sound and movement, this chatter of guests and scurrying of waiters, sat motionless in the fatigued, self conscious silence of a

great artist who has delivered a great message. Do sit at Lady Peach's table like a dear boy, cicily begged of Tony Luton, who had come in late. She and Gerald Droughtley have got together in spite of all my efforts, and they're both so dull. Try and laven things up a bit.

A loud barking sound, as of fur seels calling across Arctic ice, came from another table, where missus Menteith Mendelssohn, one of the Mendelssohn's of inver Gordon, as she was wont to describe herself, was proclaiming the glories and subtleties of Gaula's achievement. It was a revelation, she shouted. I sat there and saw a whole new scheme of thought unfold itself before my eyes. One could not define it. It was thought translated into action. The best

art cannot be defined. One has sat there and knew that one was seeing something one had never seen before, and yet one felt that one had seen it in one's brain all one's life. That was what was so wonderful. Ye, yes, please, She broke off sharply as a fat quail in aspect was presented to her by a questioning waiter. The voice of mister Morleverer Moore came across the table like another seal, barking at a greater distance. A roland, he observed with studied emphasis, has been called Le prince de

jactifinopine. Missus Muscleford deserves to be described as the Queen of unexpected movement. Oh I said you heard that, exclaimed missus Menteith Mendelssohn to as wide an audience as she could achieve. A rostunt has been called. Tell them what you said, mister Moore. She broke off, suddenly, mistrusting her ability to handle a French sentence. At the top of her voice, mister Moore repeated his remark. Pass it on to the next table, commanded missus Menteith

Mendelssohn. It's too good to be lost. At the next table, however, a grave impressive voice was dwelling at length on a topic remote from the event of the evening. Lady Peach considered that all social gatherings, of whatever

nature we were intended for the recital of minor domestic tragedies. She lost no time in regaling the company around her with the detailed history of an interrupted weekend in a Norfolk cottage, the most charming and delightful old world spot that you can imagine, clean and quite comfortable, just a nice distance from the sea and within easy walk of the broads, the very place for the children. We'd brought everything for a four day's stay and meant to have a really delightful

time. And then on Sunday morning we found that someone had left the spring head where our only supply of drinking water came from, uncovered, and a dead bird was floating in it. It had fallen in somehow and got drowned. Of course, we couldn't use the water that a dead body had been floating in, and there was no other supply for miles around, so we had to come away then and there, Now, what do you say to that, ah? That a linnet should dye in the spring, quoted Tony

Luton with intense feeling. There was an immediate outburst of hilarity where Lady Peach had confidently looked for expressions of concern and sympathy. Isn't Tony just perfectly cute, Isn't he? Exclaimed a young American woman with an enthusiasm to which Lady Peach entirely failed to respond. She had intended following up her story with the account of another tragedy of similar nature which had befallen her three years ago.

In argylesher, and now the opportunity had gone, she turned bossuely to the consolations of a tongue salad. At the center table, the excellent von Tolb led a chorus of congratulation and compliment, to which Gaula listened with an air of polite detachment. Much as the Sheikh Islam might receive the homage of a Wesleyan conference. To a close observer, it would have seemed probable that her attitude of fatigued indifference to the flat remarks that were showered on her had been

as carefully studied and rehearsed as any of her postures on the stage. It is something that one will appearciate more and more fully every time one sees it. One cannot see it too often. I could have sat and watch it for ours. You know, I'm looking forward to tomorrow evening when i can see it again. I knew it was going to be good, but I had no idea, so chimed the chorus between mouthfuls of quail and bites of

asparagus. Weren't the performing wolves wonderful? Exclaimed Joan in her fresh, joyous voice that rang round the room like the laughter of a woodpecker. If there is one thing that disturbs the complacency of a great artist of the halls, it is the consciousness of sharing his or her triumphs with performing birds and animals. But of course, Joan was not to be expected to know that. She pursued her subject with the assurance of one who has hit on a particularly

acceptable topic. It must have taken in them years of training and concentration to master those tricycles, she continued in high pitched soliloquy. The nice thing about them is that they don't realize a bit how clever an educational they are. It would be dreadful to have them putting on airs, wouldn't it? And yet I suppose the knowledge of being able to jump through a hoop better than

any other wolf would just have her certain amount of side. Fortunately, at this moment, a young Italian journalist at another table rose from his seat and delivered a two minutation in praise of the heroine of the evening. He spoke in rapid, nervous French with a North Italian accent, but much of what he said could be understood by the majority of those present, and the applause was unanimous. At any rate, he'd been brief, and it was permissible

to suppose that he had been witty. It was the opening for which mister gerald Drowley had been watching and waiting. The moment that the Italian enthusiast had dropped back into his seat amid a rattle of handclapping and rapping of forks and knives on the tables, Drily sprang to his feet, pushed his chair well away as for a long separation, and begged to endorse what had been so atty and gracefully, and might he add truly said by the previous speaker,

This was only the prelude to the real burden of his message. With the dexterity that comes of practice, he managed in a couple of hurried sentences to divert the course of his remarks to his own personality and career, and to inform his listeners that he was an actor of some note and experience, and had had the honor of acting under and here followed a string of names of

eminent actor managers of the day. He thought he might be pardoned for mentioning the fact that his performance of Peterkin in the Broken Nutshell had one the unstinted approval of the dramatic critics of the provincial press. Towards the end of what was a long speech, and which seemed even longer to its hearers, he reverted to the subject of Gaula's dancing and bestowed on it such loudatory remarks as

he had left over. Drawing his chair once again into his immediate neighborhood, he sat down a glow, with the satisfied consciousness of a good work worthily performed. I once acted the small part in some theatricals, got up for a charity, announced Joan in a ringing confidential voice. The Clapham Courier said that all the minor parts were very creditably sustained. Though to its very words, I felt I must tell you that, and also say how much I

enjoyed miss Musselford's dancing. Tony Luton cheered wildly. Death's a Cleveret's speech so far. He proclaimed he had been asked to liven things up at his table,

and was doing his best to achieve that result. But mister Gerald drowly joined Lady Peach in the unfavorable opinion she had formed of that irrepressible youth Ronnie, on whom Cecily kept a solicit As I showed no sign of any intention of falling in love with Gaula. He was more profitably engaged in paying court to the Gryffin von Tolb, whose hospitable mansion in Belgrave Square invested her with a special interest. In his eyes. As a professional prince charming, he

had every inducement to encourage the cult of fairy Godmother. Yes, yes, I read, I will come and hear you play as I did a promise, said the Gryffin, And you must come and dine with me one night and play to me afterwards. That is a promise. Also, yes, that is very nice of you to come and see a task an old woman. I am passionately fond of music. If I have honest I would tell you also that I am very fond of good looking boys. But this is not the age of honesty, so I must leave you to guess that.

Come on Thursday next week you can. That is nice. A heavy reigning prince dining pis me that night, poor man. He wants cheering up the art of being a reigning prince is not a very pleasing one nowadays. He has made it a boast all his life that he is liberal and his subjects conservative. Now as that is changed, No, not all. He is still liberal, but his subjects, unfortunately I become socialists. You must play

your best for him. Are there many socialists over there in Germany? I mean, asked Ronnie, who was rather out of his depth where politics were concerned. You bile, said the Griffin, with emphasis if quiver, I don't know whether it comes from better education than verse digestions. I suppose. I'm sure digestion has a good deal to do with it. In my husband's family, for example, his generation had excellent digestions, as I wasn't a

case of socialism or suicide among them. The younger generation have no digestions worth speaking of. And I have been two suicides and three socialists within the last six years. Now I must really be going. I'm not a badly known let outs don't suit my bay of life. Ronnie bent low over the Gryffin's hand and kissed it, partly because she was the kind of woman who naturally invoked such homage, but chiefly because he knew that the gesture showed off his

smooth, burnished head to advantage. The observant eyes of Lady Shalem had noted the animated conversation between the Gryffin and Ronnie, and she has overheard fragments of the invitation that had been accorded to the latter. Take as the little foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines, she quoted to herself. Not that that music boy would do much in the destructive line, but the principle is good. End of chapter nine, Chapter ten of When Will You Came?

By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came by Saki Chapter ten, Some Reflections and Ta Daum cicily awoke on the morning after the memorable evening with the satisfactory feeling of victory achieved tempered by a troubled sense of having achieved it in

the face of a reasonably grounded opposition. She had burned her boats and was glad of it, but the reek of their burning drifted rather unpleasantly across the jubilant incense swinging of her Tadum service last night had marked an immense step forward in her social career. Without running after the patronage of influential personages, she had seen it quietly and actfully put at her service. People such as the Gryffin von Tolb were going to be a power in the London world for a

very long time to come. Her Von Karl, with all his useful qualities of brain and temperament, might conceivably fall out of favor in some unexpected turn of the political wheel, and the Shalembs would probably have their little day and then a long afternoon of diminishing social importance, the placid dormouse like Gryffin would outlast them all. She had the qualities which make either for contented mediocrity or

else for very durable success, according as circumstances may dictate. She was one of those characters that can neither thrust themselves to the front, nor have any wish to do so, but being there, no ordinary power can thrust them away. With the Gryffin, as her friend, Cecily found herself in altogether a different position from that involved by the mere interested patronage of Lady Shalamb.

A vista of social succes Sessoud opened up to her, and she did not mean it to be just the ordinary success of a popular and influential hostess moving in an important circle. That people with naturally bad manners should have to be polite and considerate in their dealings with her, That people who usually held themselves aloof should have to be gracious and damiable, That the self assured should have to be just a little humble and anxious. Where she was concerned, these

things, of course, she intended to happen. She was a woman, But she told herself she intended a great deal more than that, when she traced the pattern for her scheme of social influence. In her heart, she detested the German occupation as a hateful necessity. But while her heart registered the

hatefulness, the brain recognized the necessity. The great fighting machines that the Germans had built up and maintained on land, on sea, and in air were three solid, crushing facts that demonstrated the hopelessness of any immediate thought of revolt. Twenty years hence, when the present generation was older and greyer, the chances of armed revolt would probably be equally hopeless, equally remote seeming. But

in the meantime something could have been effected in another way. The conquerors might partially Germanize London, but on the other hand, if the thing was skillfully managed, the British element within the empire might impress the mark of its influence on everything German. The fighting men might remain Prussian or Bavarian, but the thinking men, and eventually the ruling men, could gradually come under British influence,

or even be of British blood. An English liberal conservative center might stand as a bulwork against the junkodum socialism of continental Germany. So cecily reasoned with herself in a fashion induced perhaps by an earlier apprenticeship to the reading of nineteenth century articles in which the possible political and racial developments of various countries were examined

and discussed and put away in the pigeonholes of probable happenings. She had sufficient knowledge of political history to know that such a development might possibly come to pass, she had not sufficient insight into actual conditions to know that the possibility was

as remote as that of armed resistance. And the role which she saw herself playing was that of her deft and courtly political intriguer, rallying the British element and making herself agreeable to the German element, a political inspiration to the one and a social distraction to the other. At the back of her mind there lurked an honest confession that she was probably overrating her powers of statecraft and personality, that she was more likely to be carried along by the current of events

than to control or divert its direction. The political daydream remained, however, as daydreams will, in spite of the clear light of probability shining through them. At any rate, she knew, as usual what she wanted to do, and as usual she had taken steps to carry out her intentions. Last night remained in her mind a night of important victory. There also remained the

anxious proceeding of finding out if the victory had entailed any serious losses. Cicily was not one of those ill regulated people who treat the first meal of the day as a convenient occasion for serving up any differences or contentions that have been left over from the day before, more overlooked in the press of other matters. She enjoyed her breakfast and gave you Ovill unhindered opportunity for enjoying his.

A discussion as to the right cooking of a dish that he had first tasted among the Orenburg tartars was the prevailing topic on this particular morning, and blended well with trout and toast and coffee in a cozy nook of the smoking room in participation of the after breakfast cigarettes, Cecily made her dash into debatable ground. You haven't asked me how my supper party went off, she said. There's a notice of it in two of the morning papers with a list of

those present. Said Yeovil, The conquering race seems to have been very well represented. Several races were represented, said Cecily. A function of that sort, celebrating a dramatic first night was bound to be cosmopolitan. In fact, blending of races and nationalities is the tendency of the age we live in. The blending of races seems to have been consummated already in one of the individuals at your party, said Yeovil dryly. The name Menteith Mendelssohn struck me as

a particularly happy obliteration of racial landmarks, Cicily laughed. A noisy and very wearisome sort of woman, she commented, She reminds one of garlic that's been planted by mistake in the conservatory. Still, she is useful as an advertising agent to anyone who rubs her the right way. She'll be invaluable claiming the merits of Gaula's performance to all and sundry. That's why I invited her.

She'll probably lunch today at the hotel Cecil, and everyone's sitting within a hundred yards of her table will hear what an emotional education they can get by going to see Gaula. Dance at the Caravanswery. She seems to be like the Salvation Army, said Yovil. Her noise reaches a class of people who wouldn't travel to read press notices exactly, said Cecily. Gaula gets quite good notices

on the whole, doesn't she. The one that took my fancy was the one in the standard, said Yovil, picking up the paper from a table by his side and searching its columns for the notice in question. The wolves, which appeared earlier in the evening's entertainment are the programmershows us trained entirely by kindness. It would have been a further kindness at any rate to the audience if some of the training, which the wolves doubtless do not appreciate at its

proper value, had been expended on Miss Musseleford's efforts at stage dancing. We are assured again on the authority of the program at the much talked of suggestion dances of the last word imposture dancing. The last word belongs by immemorial right to the sex which Miss Musseleford a dawns, and it would be ungallant to seek to deprive her of her privilege. As far as the educational aspect of her performance is concerned, we must admit that the life of the Fern remains

to us a private life. Still, Miss Musseleford has abandoned her own private life in an unveiling attempt to draw the Fern into the gaze of publicity. And so it was with her other suggestions. They suggested many things, but nothing that was announced on the program. Chiefly, they suggested one outstanding reflection that stage dancing is not like those advertised breakfast foods that can be served up after three minutes preparation. Half a lifetime, or rather half a youth time,

is a much more satisfactory allowance. The standard is prejudiced, said Cecily. Some of the other papers are quite enthusiastic. The Dawn gives her a column and a quarter of notice, nearly all of it complimentary. It says the report of her fame as a dancer went before her, but that her performance last night caught it up and outstripped it. I should not like to suggest that The Dawn is prejudiced, said Yoval, But shame them is a

managing director on it, and one of its biggest childers. Gall As dancing is an event of the social season, and shame them is one of those most interested in keeping out the appearance at any rate of a London social season. Besides, her debut gave the opportunity for an imperial visit to the theater, the first appearance at a festive public function of the conqueror among the monkad. Apparently the experiment passed off well. Shalem has every reason to feel pleased

with himself and well disposed towards Gaula. Find a way, added Yobil, talking of Gaula, I'm going down to Torywood one day next week to Torywood, exclaimed Cecily. The turn of her exclamation gave the impression that the announcement was not very acceptable to her. I promised the old lady that I would go and have a talk with her when I came back from my Siberian trip. She traveled in eastern Russia, you know, long before the Trans Siberian

Railway was built, and she's enormously interested in those parts. In any case, I should like to see her again. She does not see many people nowadays, said Cecily. I fancy she's breaking up. Rather she was very fond of the son who went down. You know, she has seen a great many of the things she cared for go down, said Yobil. It is a sad old life that's left to her when one thinks of all that the past has been to her, of the part she used to play in

the world, the work she used to get through. Is used to seem as though she could never grow old, as if she would die standing up with some unfinished command on her lips. Now I suppose her tragedy is that she has grown old, bitterly old, and cannot die. Cecily was silent for a moment and seemed about to leave the room. Then she turned back and said, I don't think I would say anything about Gaula to her. If I were you, it would not have occurred to me to drag her

name into our conversation, said Yovil coldly. But in any case, the accounts of her dancing performance will have reached Torryward through the newspapers, also the record of your racially blended supper party. Cecily said nothing. She knew that by last night affair she had definitely identified her in public opinion. With the Shalem clique and that many of her old friends would look on her with distrust

and suspicion. On that account, it was unfortunate, but she reckoned it a lesser evil than tearing herself away from her London life, its successes and pleasures and possibilities. These social dislocations and severings of friendship were to be looked for after any great and violent change and state affairs. It was Yeovil's attitude that really troubled her. She would not give way to his prejudices and accept his point of view, but she knew that a victory that involved estrangement from

him would only bring a mockery of happiness. She still hoped that he would come round to an acceptance of established facts and then his political malaise in the absorbing distraction of field sports. The visit to tory Wood was a misfortune. It might just turn the balance in the undesired direction. Only a few weeks of late summer and early morning remained before the hunting season and its preparations would be at hand, and Yovil might be caught in the meshes of an old

enthusiasm. In those few weeks, however, he might be fired by another sort of enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which would sooner or later mean voluntary or enforced exile for his part, and the probable breaking up of her own social plans and ambitions. But Cecily knew something of the futility of improvising objections where no real obstacle exists. The visit to Torywood was a graceful attention on Yovil's part to an old friend. There was no decent ground on which it could be

opposed. If the influence of that visit came athwart Yovil's life and hers with disastrous effect, that was kismet, And once again the reek from her burned and smoldering boats mingled threateningly with the incense fumes of her taedium for victory. She left the room, and Yovil turned once more to an item of use

in the morning's papers that had already arrested his attention. The Imperial auf Clarum on the subject of military service was to be made public in the course of the day end of chapter ten Chapter eleven of When William came by Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor when William came by Saki chapter eleven the tea shop, Yeovil

wandered down Piccadilly that afternoon in a spirit of restlessness and expectancy. The long awaited auf Clarum dealing with the new law of military service had not yet appeared. At any moment he might meet the horse throated newsboys running along with their papers announcing the special edition which would give the terms of the edict to the

public. Every sound or movement that detached itself with isolated significance from the general word and scurity of the streets seemed to Yovil to herald the oncoming clamor and rush that he was looking for. But the long endless succession of motors and buses and vans went by, hooting and grunting, and such newsboys as were to be seen, hung about listlessly, bearing no more attractive bait on their posters than the announcement of an earthquake shock in Hungary fear loss of life.

The Green Park end of Piccadilly was a changed, and in some respect a livelier thoroughfare than that which Yovill remembered with affectionate regret. A great political club had migrated from its palatial home to a shrunken habitation in a less prosperous quarter.

Place was filled by the flamboyant frontage of the hotel Constantinople. Gorgeous Turkey carpets were spread over the wide entrance steps, and boys in Circassian and Anatolian costumes hung about the doors or dashed forth in none oriental haste to carry such messages, as the telephone was unable to transmit Picturesque sellers of Turkish delight, atter of roses and brasswork coffee services squatted under the portico on terms of obvious

good understanding with the hotel management. A few doors further down, a service club that had long been a Piccadilly landmark was a landmark still as the home of the Army aeronaut Club, and there was a constant coming and going of gay hued uniforms Saxon, Prussian, Bavarian, Hessian and so forth through its portals. The mastering of the air and the creation of a scientific aerial war fleet second anon in the world was an achievement of which the conquering race was

pardonably proud, which it had good reason to be duly thankful. Over the gateways was blazoned the badge of the Club, an elephant, whale and eagle, typifying the three armed forces of the state by land and sea and air. The eagle bore in its beak a scroll with the proud legend the last

am I, but not the least. To the eastward of this gaily humming hive, the long shuttered front, who are deserted ducal mansions struck a note of protest and mourning amid the noise and whirl and color of a seemingly uncaring city. On the other side of the roadway, on the graveled paths of the Green Park, small ragged children from the back streets of Westminster looked wistfully at the smooth, trim stretches of grass on which it was now forbidden in

two languages to set foot. Only the pigeons, disregarding the changes of political geography, walked about as usual, wondering, perhaps if they ever wondered at anything, At the sudden change in the distribute of park humans, Jovial turned his steps out of the hot sunlight into the shade of the Burlington Arcade, familiarly known to many of its newer frequenters as the Passage. Here, the change that new conditions and requirements had wrought was more immediately noticeable than anywhere else

in the West End. Most of the shops on the western side had been cleared away, and in their place had been installed an open air cafe, converting the long alley into a sort of promenade tea garden, Flanked on one side by a line of haberdashers, perfumers and jewelers show windows. The patrons of the cafe could sit at the little round tables, drinking their coffee and syrups and aperitifs, and gazing, if they were so minded, at the

pajamas and cravats and Brazilian diamonds spread out for inspection Before them. A string orchestra hidden away somewhere in a gallery was alternating Grand Opera with the Gondola Girl and the latest gems of Transatlantic melody. From around the tightly packed tables arose a babble of tongues made up chiefly of German, a South American rendering of Spanish and a North American rendering of English, with here and there the sharp,

shaken out staccato of Japanese. A sleepy looking boy in a nondescript uniform was wandering to and fro among the customers, offering for sale the Matta New York Herald, bone in a tagerblat, and a host of crudely colored illustrated papers embodying the hard worked wit of a world legion of comic artists. Y Oval hurried through the arcade. It was not here, in this atmosphere of staring alien eyes and jangling tongues, that he wanted to read the news of

the Imperial Aufklarul. By a succession of byways, he reached Hanover Square and thence made his way into Oxford Street. There was no commotion of activity to be noticed yet among the newsboys. The posters, still concerned themselves with the earthqua making Hungary, varied with references to the health of the King of Roumania

and a motor accident in South London. Yeovil wandered aimlessly along the street for a few dozen yards, and then turned down into the smoking room of a cheap tea shop, where he judged that the flourishing foreign element would be less conspicuously represented. Quiet, voiced, smooth headed youths from neighboring shops and wholesale houses sat drinking tea in munching pastry, some of them reading, others making a fitful rattle with dominoes on the marble topped tables. A clean, wholesome

smell of tea and coffee made itself felt through clouds of cigarette smoke. Cleanliness and listlessness seemed to be the dominant notes of the place, a cleanliness that was commendable and a listlessness that seemed unnatural and undesirable. Where so much youth was gathered together for a refreshment and recreation, Yeovil seated himself at a table already occupied by a young clergyman who was smoking a cigarette over The remains were

plateful of buttered toast. He had a keen, clever, hard lined face, the face of a man who, in an earlier stage of European history might have been a warlike prior, awkward to tackle. At the council board, greatly to be avoided. Where blows were being exchanged, a pale, silent, damosel drifted up to Yovil, and took his order with an air of being mentally some hundreds of miles away and utterly indifferent to the requirements of

those whom she served. If she had brought calf's foot jelly instead of a pot of china tea he had asked for, Yeovil would hardly have been surprised. However, the tea Julie arrived on the table, and the pale Damosel scribbled a figure on a slip of paper, put it silently by the side of the teapot, and drifted silently away. Yovil had seen the same sort of thing done on the musical comedy stage, and done rather differently. The can who tell me, sir, is the Imperial announcement out yet, asked

the young clergyman, after a brief scrutiny of his neighbor. Now, I've been waiting about from the last half hour on the lookout for it, said Yeovil. The special editions ought to be out now, Then, he added, I have only just lately come back from abroad. I know scarcely anything of Landon as it is now. You may imagine that a good deal of it is very strange to me. Your profession must take you a good deal among all classes of people. I've seen something of what one can call the

upper or attenuate the richer classes since I came back. Do tell me something about the poorer classes of the community. How do they take the new order of things? Badly? Said the young cleric. Badly in more senses than one. They are helpless, and they are bitter, bitter in the useless kind of way that produces no great resolutions. They look round for some one to blame for what has happened. They blamed politicians, They blamed the leiged

classes. In an indirect way, I believe they blamed the church. Certainly, their national disaster has not drawn them towards religion in any form. One thing you may be sure of. They do not blame themselves. No true landoner ever admits that the fault lies at his door. No I never is an exclamation that is on his lips from earliest childhood, whenever he is charged with anything blameworthy or punishable. That is why's school discipline was ever a thing

repugnant to the school board child and its parents. No school board scholar ever deserved punishment, however obvious the fault might seem to a disciplinarian. No, I never exonerated it as something that had not happened. Public schoolboys and private schoolboys of the upper and middle class had their fling and took their thrashings when they were found out as a piece of bad luck. But our bird and our Sid were of those for whom there is no condemnation. If they were

punished, it was for faults that now they never committed. Naturally, the grown up generation of Berts and Sids, the voters and householders, do not realize, still less admit that it was they who called the tune to which the politicians danced. They had to choose between the vote mongers and the so called scaremongers, and their verdict was for the vote mongers all the time. Now they're bitter. They're being punished, and punishment is not a thing that

they have been schooled to bear. The taxes that are falling on them are a grievous source of discontent, and the military service that will be imposed on them for the first time in their lives will be another. There is a more lovable side to their character under misfortune, though, added the young clergyman deep down in their hearts, there was a very real affection for the Old

Dynasty. Future historians will perhaps be able to explain how and why the Royal Family of Great Britain captured the imaginations of its subjects in so genuine and lasting

of hair. Among the poorest and most matter of fact, for whom the name of no public man, politician or philanthropist stands out with any especial significance, the old Queen and the dead King, the dethroned monarch, and the young prince live in a sort of domestic pantheon, a recollection that is a proud and wistful personal possession, when so little remains to be proud of or

to possess. There is no favor that I am so often asked for among my poorer parishioners as the gift of the picture of this or that member of the Old Dynasty. I have got all of them, only except Princess Mary, an old woman said to me last week, and she nearly cried with pleasure when I brought her an old bystander portrait that filled the gap in her collection. And on Queen alexanter As day, they bring out and where the

faded wild rose favors that they boughted their pennies in days gone by. The tragedy of the enactment that is about to enforce military service on these people is that it comes when they have no longer a country to fight for, said Yeovil, the young clergyman, gave an exclamation of bitter impatience. That is the cruel mockery of the whole thing. Every now and then, in the course of my work, I have come across lads who were rarely drifting to

the bed. Through the good qualities in them, a clean combative strain in their blood, and a natural turn for adventure, made the ordinary and mnemic routine of shop or warehouse or factory almost unbearable for them. What splendid little soldiers they would have made, and how grandly the discipline of a military training

would have steadied them in after life when steadiness was wanted. The only adventure that their surroundings offered them had been the adventure of practicing mildly criminal misdeeds without getting landed in reformatoris in prisons. Those of them that have not been successful in keeping clear of detection are walking round and round prison yards, experiencing the

operation of a discipline that breaks and does not build. They were many hearted boys once with nothing of the criminal, or ne'er do well in their natures. And now, who you ever seen the prison yard with that walk round and round and round between gray walls under a blue sky. You will nodded.

It's good enough for criminals and imbeciles, said the parson, But think of it for those boys who might have been marching along to the tap of the drum with a laugh on their lips instead of hell in their hearts. I have had hell in my heart sometimes when I have come in touch with cases like those. I suppose you're thinking that I'm a strange sort of parson. I was justifying you in my mind, said Yoval, as a man

of God with an infinite tendency for little devil's. The clergyman flushed, and rather a fine epish half to have on one's tombstone, he said, especially if the tombstone were in some crowded city graveyard. I suppose I am a man of God, but I don't think I could be called a man of peace. Looking into the strong young face with its suggestion of a fighting prior

of bygone days more marked than ever. Yeo will mentally agreed that he could not have learnt one thing in life, continued the young man, and that his piece is not for this world. Peace is what God gives us when he takes us into his rest. Beat your sword into a plowshare of you like, but beat your enemy into Smitherin's first, a long drawn cry, repeated again and again, detached itself from the throb and hoot and word of

the street traffic special, military serves Special. The young clergyman sprang up from his seat and went up the staircase in a succession of bounds, causing the domino players and novelette readers to look up for a moment in mild astonishment. In a few seconds he was back again with a copy of an afternoon paper. The Imperial prescript was set forth in heavy type in parallel columns of English and German. As the young man read, a deep burning flush spread over

his face, then headed away into a chalky whiteness. He read the announcement to the end, and then handed the paper to Yeovil and left without a word. Beneath the courtly politeness and benignant phraseology of the document ran a trenchant,

searing irony. The British born subjects of the Germanic Crown inhabiting the islands of Great Britain and Ireland had habituated themselves as a people to the disuse of arms and resolutely excluded military service and national training from their political system and daily life. Their judgment that they were unsuited as a race to bear arms and

conform to military discipline was not to be set aside. Their new overlord did not propose to do violence to their feelings and customs by requiring from them the personal military sacrifices and services which were rendered by his subjects German born. The British subjects of the Crown were to remain a people consecrated to peaceful pursuits to

commerce and trade and husbandry. The defense of their coasts and shipping, and the maintenance of order and general safety would be guaranteed by a garrison of German

troops with the co operation of the Imperial War Fleet. German born subjects residing temporarily or permanently in the British Isles would come under the same laws respecting compulsory military service as their fellow subjects of German blood in the other parts of the Empire, and special enactments would be drawn up to ensure that their interests did

not suffer from a periodical withdrawing on training or other military calls. Necessarily, a heavily differentiated scale of war taxation would fall on British taxpayers to provide for the upkeep of the garrison and to equalize the services and sacrifices rendered by the two branches of His Majesty's subjects. As military service was not henceforth open to any subject of British birth, no further necessity for any training or exercise of

a military nature existed. Therefore, all rifle clubs, drill associations, cadet cause and similar bodies were henceforth declared to be illegal. No weapons other than guns for specified sporting purposes, duly declared and registered, and open to inspection when required, could be owned, purchased, or carried. The science of arms was to be eliminated altogether from the life of a people who had shown such marked repugnance to its study and practice. The cold irony of the measure

struck home with the greater force because its nature was so utterly unexpected. Public anticipation had guessed at various forms of military service, aggressively irksome or tactfully lightened, as the case might be, in any event, certain to be bitterly

unpopular. And now there had come this contemptuous boon, which had removed at one stroke the bogey of compulsory military service from the troubled imaginings of the British people, and fastened on them the cruel distinction of being, in actual fact what an enemy had called them in splenetic scorn long years ago, A nation of shopkeepers, ay something even below that level, a race of shopkeepers who were no longer a nation. Jovel crumpled the paper in his hand and went

out into the sunlit street. A sudden roll of drums and crash of brass music filled the air. A company of Bavarian infantry went by, in all the pomp and circumstance of martial array and the joyous swing of rapid rhythmic movement. The street echoed and throbbed in the Englishman's ears, with the exultant pulse of youth and mastery set to loud pagan music. A group of lads from the tea shop clustered on the pavement and watched the troops go by, staring

at a phase of life in which they had no share. The marshal trappings, the swaggering joy of life, the comradeship of camp and barracks, the hard discipline of drill yard and fatigue duty, the long sentry watchings, the trench digging, forced marches, wound cold hunger, makeshift hospitals, and the blood wet laurels. These were not for them, such things they might only guess at or see on a cinema film. Darkly, they belonged to the

civilian nation. The function of afternoon tea was still being languidly observed in the Big drawing room when Yoval returned to Berkshire Street. Cicily was playing the part of hostess to a man of perhaps forty one years of age, who looked slightly older from his palpable attempts to look very much younger. Percival Plazi was a plump, pale faced, short legged individual with puffy cheeks, over prominent

nose, and thin, colorless hair. His mother, with nothing more than maternal prejudice to excuse her, had discovered some twenty years ago that he was a well favored young man and had easily imbued her son with the same opinion. The slipping away of years and the natural transition of an unathletic boy into

the podgy, unhealthy looking man did little to weaken the tradition. Plasi had never been able to relinquish the idea that a youthful charm and comeliness still centered in his person, and labored daily at his toilet with the devotion that a hopelessly lost cause is so often able to inspire. He babbled incessantly about himself and the accessory futilities of his life, in short, neat complacent sentences, and in a voice that Ronald Store said reminded one of a fat bishop blessing

a butter making competition. While he babbled, he kept his eyes fastened on his listeners to observe the impression which his important little announcements and pronouncements were making. On the present occasion, he was pattering forth a detailed description of the upholstery and fittings of his new music room, all the hangings violet deparm, all the furnish of rosewood, the only ornament in the room is a replica of the Mozart statue in Vienna. Nothing but Mozart is to be played in

the room. Absolutely nothing but Mozart. You will get rather tired of that, won't you, said Cecily, feeling that she was expected to comment on this tremendous announcement. One gets tired of everything, said Plasi, with a fat little sigh of resignation. I can't tell you how tired I am of Rubenstein, and one day I suppose I should be tired of Mozarts and Violet de Palm and Rosewood. I never thought it possible that I could ever tire of john quills, and now I simply won't have one in the house.

Oh the scene the other day because someone brought some John quils into the house. I'm afraid I was dreadfully rude, but I rarely couldn't help it. He could talk like this through a long summer day or long winter evening. Jovial belonged to a race forbidden to bear arms. At the moment, he would gladly have contented himself with the weapons with which nature had endowed him. If he might have kicked and pommeled the abhorrent specimen of male humanity whom he

saw before him. Instead, he broke into the conversation with an inspired flash of malicious untruthfulness. It is wonderful, he observed, carelessly, how popular that Viennese statue of Mozart has become. A friend who inspects county council art schools, tell me you'll find a copy of it in every classroom you go into. It was a poor substitute for physical violence, but it was all that civilization allowed him in the way of relieving his feelings. It had,

moreover, the effect of making Plaza profoundly miserable. End of chapter eleven. Chapter twelve of When William Came By Sarkee. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee, Chapter twelve, The Traveling Companions. The train bearing Yeovil on his visit to Torywood, slid and rattled westward through the hazy dreamland of an

English summer landscape seen from the train windows. The stark, bare uglinness of the metal line was forgotten, and the eye rested only on the green solitude that unfolded itself as the miles went slipping by. Tall grasses and meadoweeds stood in deep shocks field after field, between the leafy boundaries of hedge or coppice, thrusting themselves higher and higher till they touched the low, sweeping branches of

the trees that here and there overshadowed them. Broad streams, bordered with the heavy fringe of reed and sedge, went winding away into a green distance where woodland and meadowland seemed indefinitely prolonged. Narrow streamlets lost to view in the growth that they fostered, disclosed their presence merely by the water weed that showed in

a riband of rank verdure threading the mellow a green of the fields. On the stream banks, more hens walked with jerky, confident steps, in the easy boldness of those who had a couple of other elements at their disposal in an emergency. More timorous partridges raced away from the apparition of the train, looking all leg and neck like little forest elves fleeing from human encounter, and

in the distance over the tree line. A heron or two flapped with slow measured wing beats and an air of being bent on an immeasurably longer journey than the train that hurtled so frantically along the rails. Now and then the meadow land changed itself suddenly into orchard, with close growing trees already showing the measure of their coming harvest. And then strawyard and farm buildings would slide into view.

Heavy dairy cattle, roan and skewballed and dappled, stood near the gates, drowsily, resentful of insect stings, and bunched up companies of ducks, halted in seeming a resolution between the charms of the horse bond and the alluring

neighborhood of the farm kitchen. Away by the banks of some rushing mill stream, in a setting of copse and cornfield, a village might be guessed at just a hint of red roof, gray wreathed chimney and old church tower as seen from the windows of the passing train, and over it all brooded a happy, settled calm, like the dreaming murmur of a trout stream and the

far away cawing of rooks. It was a land where it seemed as if it must be always summer and generally afternoon, a land where bees hummed among the wild thyme and in the flower beds of cottage gardens, where the harvest mice rustled amid the corn and nettles, and the mill race flowed cool and silent through water weeds and dark tunneled sluices, and made soft, droning music

with the wooden mill wheel. And the music carried with it the wording of old, undying rhymes and sang of the jolly, uncaring, uncared for miller, of the farmer who went riding upon his gray mare, of the mouse who lived beneath the merry mill pin, of the sweet music on yonder green Hill, and the dancers all in yellow, the songs and fancies of a lingering olden time when men took life as children take a long summer day, and went to bed at last, with a simple trust in something they could

not have explained. Jovial watched the passing landscape with the intent, hungry eyes of a man who revisits a scene that holds high place in his affections. His imagination raced even quicker than the train, following winding roads and twisting valleys into unseen distances, picturing farms and hamlets, hills and hollows, clattering in yards and sleepy woodlands. A beautiful country, said his only fellow traveler,

who was also gazing at the fleeting landscape. Surely a country worth fighting for. He spoke in fairly correct English, But he was unmistakably a foreigner. One could have allotted him with some certainty to the eastern half of Europe. A beautiful country, as you say, replied Jovil. Then he added the question are you German? No, a Hungarian, said the other. And

you are English, he asked. I have been much in England, but I am from Russia, said Yeovil, purposely misneading his companion on the subject of his nationality in order to induce him to talk with greater freedom on a delicate topic. While living among foreigners in a foreign land, he had shrunk from hearing his country's disaster discuss nor even alluded to. Now he was anxious to learn what unprejudiced foreigners thought of the catastrophe and the causes which had led

up to it. It is a strange spectacle I wonder is it not so resumed the other? A great nation such as this was one of the greatest nations in modern times or of any time, carrying its flag and its language into all parts of the world. And now, after one short campaign, it is. And he shrugged his shoulders many times and made clucking noises at the roof of his voice, like a hen calling to a brood of roving chickens as they grow soft. He resumed a great world. Commerce brings great

luxury, and luxury brings softness. They had everything to warn them things happening in their own time and before their eyes, and they would not be warned. They had seen in one generation the rise of the military and naval power of the Japanese, a brown skinned race living in some island, ice fields and a tropical sea, the people once thought of in connection with paper fans and flowers and pretty tea gardens, who suddenly marched and sailed into the world's

gaze as a great power. They had seen two so eyes of the Bulgards, a poor herd of Zappidiere, who ridden peasants fist, a few students scattered in exile in Bucharest, Odessa, who shot up in one generation to be an armed and aggressive nation with history in its hands. The English saw these things happening, arm them, and with a war cloud growing blacker and bigger and always more threatening, on their old threshold, they sat down to

grow soft and peaceful. They goose, soft and accommodating in all things. In religion. In religion, said Yovil. In religion, yes, said his companion emphatically. They had come to look on the Christ as a sort of amiable elder father, whose letters from aboard were worth reading. Then when they had emptied all the divine mystery and wonder out of their faith, naturally

they grew tired of it. Oh, but dreadfully tired of it. I know many English of the country parts, and always they tell me they go to church once in each week to set the good example to the servants. They were tired of their faith, but they were not ver high enough to become real pagans. Their dancing fauns were good young men who tripped morris dancers and late helped foods, and believed in a sort of socialism which made for

the greatest dullness. Of the greatest number, you will find plenty of them. Still if you go into us remains of social London, yeovil gave a grunt of acquiescence. They grew soften, their political ideas tinued. The unsparing critic for the old insular beliefs that all the foreigners were devils and rogues. They substituted an ass a belief equally guarded in insular lack of knowledge, that most foreigners were amiable good fellows who only needed to be talked to and patted

on the back to become your friends and benefactors. They began to believe that our foreign minister would train English long cherished schemes of national policy and hostile expansion if he came over on a holiday and was asked out to country houses and so unders tennis court and the ock garden and the younger children decent. I once heard it solemnly stated that an after dinner debate in some listollery club that a certain very prominent a German statesman had a daughter at school in England,

and that future friendly relations between the two countries were improved in prospect. If not a rued by that circumstance, you think I'm laughing, I am according fact and the men present with politicians and statesmen, as very literary didly Dante.

It was an insular lack of insights the words the mischief or some of the mischief we in Hungary if he left too much cheek by jove with our racial neighbors to have many illusions about them Austrians, Romanians, Serbs, Italians, checks We know of what they think of us, and we know what to think of them. We know what we want in the world, and we know what they want. That knowledge does not send us flying at each

other's roads, but he does keep us from going soft. Ah, the British lion was in a hurry to inaugurate the Millennium and to lie down gracefully with the lamb. He made two mistakes, only two, but they were very bad ones. The Millennium hadn't arrived, and it was not a lamb as he was lie down with. You do not like the English, I gadda, said Yeovil, as the Hungarian went off into a short burst of satirical laughter. I have always liked them, he answered, but now I

am angry with them for being soft. Here's my station, he added, as the train slowed down and he commenced to gather his belongings together. I am angry with them, he continued, as a final word on the subject, because I hate sir Germans. He raised his hat punctiliously in a parting salute and stepped out onto the platform. His place was taken by a large, loose limbed man with a florid face and big staring eyes, and an

immense array of fishing basket, rod, flycases and so forth. He was of the type that one could instinctively locate as a loud voiced, self constituted authority on whatever topic might happen to be discussed in the bars of small hotels. Are you English? He asked, after a preliminary stare at Yeovil. This time Yeovil did not trouble to disguise his nationality. He nodded curtly to his questioner. Glad of that, said the fisherman. I don't like traveling

with Germans. Unfortunately, said Yobil. We have to travel with them as partners in the same state concern, and not by any means a predominant partner either. Oh, that will soon write itself, said the other, with loud assertiveness. That will right itself damn soon. Nothing in politics rights itself, said Yobil. Things have to be righted, which is a different matter. What do you mean, said the fisherman, who did not like to

have his assertions taken up and shaken into shape. We have given a clever and domineering people a chance to plant themselves down as masters in our land. I don't imagine that they are going to give us an easy chance to push them out. To do that, we shall have to be a little cleverer than they are, a little harder, a little fiercer, and a good deal more self sacrificing than we have been in my life time, or yours will be that. Right enough, said the fisherman. We mean business this

time. The last war wasn't a war. There was a snap. We weren't prepared and they were. That won't happen again, bless you. I know what I'm talking about. I go up and down the country and I hear what people are saying. Yeovil privately doubted if he ever heard anything that his own opinions. It tends to reason, continued the Fisherman did a highly civilized race like ours. With the record that we've had for leading the whole world is not going to be held under for long by a lot of dams

sausage eating Germans. Don't you believe it. I know what I'm talking about now. I've traveled about the world a bit. Yeovil shrewdly suspected that the world travels amounted to nothing more than a trip to the United States and perhaps the Channel Islands, with possibly a week or a fortnight in Paris. It isn't the past you've got to think of, it's the future, said Yeovil. Other maritime pars had passed to look on Spain and Harmon, for instance.

The past didn't help when they let their sea sovereignty slip from them. That is a matter of history, and not very distant history either. Now that's where you make a mistake, said the other. Our sea sovereignty hasn't slipped from us and won't do neither. There's a British empire beyond the seas Canada, Australia, New Zealand, East Africa. He rolled the names round

his tongue with obvious relish. If it was a list of first class battleships, en armored cruisers and destroyers, and the airships that you were reading off. There would be some comfort and hope in the situation, said Yeovil. The loyalty of the colonies is a splendid thing, but it is only pathetically splendid because it can do so little to recover for us what we last against the Zeppelin air fleet, and the dreadnought sea squadrons and the new gelber House

cruisers. The last word in maritime mobility of what a vail is loyal devotion class half a dozen warships one keel to ten, scattered over one or two ocean coasts. Ah. But they'll build, said the fisherman, Confidently, they'll build. They're only waiting to enlarge their dockyard accommodation and get the right class of artificers and engineers and workmen together. The money will be forthcoming somehow,

and they'll start in and build. And do you suppose, asked Yeovil, in slow, bitter contempt, that the victorious nation is going to sit and watch and wait till the defeated foe has created a new war fleet big enough to drive it from the seas. Do you suppose that is going to watch? Keel added to keel for gun to gun airship to airship till its preponderance has been wiped out or even threatened. That sort of thing is done

once in a generation, not twice. Who is going to protect Australia on New Zealand while they enlarge their dockyards and hangers and build their dreadnoughts and their airships. Here's my station, and I'm not sorry, said the fisherman, gathering his tackle together and rising to depart. I've listened to you long enough. You and me wouldn't agree, not if we were to talk all day. Fact is, I'm out and out patriot, and you're only a half

hearted one. That's what you are, half hearted. And with that parting shot, he left the carriage and lounged heavily adown the platform. A patriot who had never handled a rifle, or mounted a horse or pulled a know but who had never flinched from demolishing his country's enemies with his tongue. England has never had any lack of patriots on a time, thought Yeovil, Sadly, so many patriots and so little patriotism. End of chapter twelve, Chapter

thirteen of When William came by Sarkee. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William came by Saki, chapter thirteen, Tory Wood, Yeovil got out of the train a small clean wayside station, and rapidly formed the conclusion that neatness, abundant leisure, and a devotion to the cultivation of wall flowers and wyandots were the prevailing

influences of the station master's life. The train slid away into the hazy distance of trees and meadows, and left the traveler standing in a world that seemed to be made up in equal parts of rock garden, chicken coops, and whiskey advertisements. The station master, who appeared also to act as emergency porter, took Yeoville's ticket with the gesture of a kind arted person, brushing away a troublesome wasp, and returned to a study of the Poultry Chronicle, which

was giving its readers sage Council concerning the ailments of belated July chickens. Yovil called to mind the station master of a tiny railway town in Siberia, who had held him in long and rather intelligent converse on the poetical merits and demerits of Shelley, And he wondered what the result would be if he were to engage the English official in a discussion on Lermontoff, or, for the matter

of that, on Shelley. The temptation to experiment was, however, removed by the arrival of a young groom with brown eyes and a friendly smile, who hurried into the station and took Yovil once more into a world where he was of fleeting importance. In the roadway outside was a four wheeled dog cart

with a pair of the famous Torywood blue roans. It was an agreeable variation in modern locomotion to be met at a station with high class horse flesh instead of the ubiquitous motor, and the landscape was not of such a nature that one wished to be whirled through it in a cloud of dust. After a quick spin of some ten or fifteen minutes through twisting hedgegirt country roads, the roans turned in at a wide gateway and went with dancing rhythmic step along the

park drive. The screen of oak crowned upland suddenly fell away, and a gray, sharp cornered building came into view in a setting of low growing beaches and dark pines. Tory Wood was not a stately, reposeful looking house. It lay amid the sleepy landscape like a couched watchdog with pricked ears and wakeful

eyes. Built somewhere about the last years of Dutch William's reign, it had been the center ever since for the political life of the countryside, a storm center of discontent, or a rallying ground for the well affected, as the circumstances of the day might entail. On the stone flagged terrace in front of the house, with its quaint leaden figures of Diana pursuing a hound pressed stag.

Successive squires and lords of Torywood had walked to and fro with their friends, watching the thunderclouds on the political horizon, or the shifting shadows on the sundial of political favor, tapping the political barometer for indications of change, working out a party campaign, or arranging for the support of some national movement.

To and fro they had gone, in their respective generations, men with the passion for stake craft and political combats strong in their veins, and many oft recurring names had echoed under those wakeful looking casements, names spoken in anger or exultation, or murmured in fear and anxiety. Bolingbrook, Charles, Edward, Walpole, the Farmer, King Bonaparte, Pitt Wellington, Peel, Ladstone, Echo, and Time might have gravened their names on the stone flags and gray

walls. And now one tired old woman walked there with names on her lips that she never uttered. A friendly riot of fox terriers and spaniels greeted the carriage, leaping and rolling and yelping in an exuberance of sociability, as though horses and coachmen and groom were comrades who had been absent for long months.

Instead of half an hour, an indiscriminately affectionate puppy lay flat and whimpering at Yovil's feet, sending up little showers of gravel with its wildly thumping tail, while two of the terriers raced each other madly across lawn and shrubbery, as though to show the blue roans what speed really was. The laughing eyed young groom disentangled the puppy from between Yovil's legs, and then he was ushered into the gray silence of the entrance hall, leaving sunlight and noise and the stir

of life behind him. Her ladyship will see you in her writing room, he was told, and he followed a irvant along the dark passages to the well remembered room. There was something tragic in the sudden contrast between the vigor and youth and pride of life that Yeovil had seen crystallized in those dancing, high stepping horses, scampering dogs, and alert, clean limbed young men servants,

and the aged, frail woman who came forward to meet him. Eleanor Dowager Lady gray Martin had for more than half a century been the ruling spirit at Torywood. The affairs of the county had not sufficed for her untiring activities of mind and body. In the wider field of national and imperial service, she had worked and schemed and fought with an energy and a far sightedness that came probably from the blend of caution and bold restlessness in her Scottish blood.

For many educated minds, the arena of politics and public life is a weariness of dust and disgust. To others, it is a fascinating study to be watched from the comfortable seat of a spec data. To her, it was a home in her town house, or down at Tory Wood, with her writing pad on her knee and the telephone at her elbow, or in personal counsel with some trusted colleague, or persuasive argument with a halting, adherent or

half convinced opponent. She had labored on behalf of the poor and the ill equipped, had fought for her idea of the right, and above all, for the safety and sanity of her fatherland. Spadework when necessary and leadership when called for came alike within the scope of her activities, and not least of her achievements, though perhaps she hardly realized it was the force of her example alone, indomitable fighter, calling to the half caring and the half discouraged,

to the laggard and the slow moving. And now she came across the room with the tired step of a tired king. And that look which the French so expressively call leir de fae, the charm which Heaven bestows on old ladies, reserving its highest gift to the end, had always seemed in her case to be lost sight of in the dignity and interest of a great dame who was still in the full prime of her fighting and ruling powers. Now in Ioville's eyes, she had suddenly come to be very old, stricken with the

forlorn languor of one who knows that death will be weary to wait. For she had spared herself nothing in the long labor, the ceaseless building, the watch and ward, and in one short autumn week she had seen the overthrow of all that she had built, the falling asunder of the world in which she had labored. Her life's end was like a harvest home, when blight

and storm have laid waste the fruit of long toil and unsparing outlay. Victory had been her goal, the death or victory of an old heroic challenge, for she had always dreamt to die fighting to the last death or victory, and the gods had given her neither, only the bitterness of a defeat that could not be measured in words, and the weariness of a life that had

outlived happiness or hope. Such was Eleanor Dowager, Lady gray Martin, a shadow amid the young, red blooded life at Torywood, but a shadow that was too real to die, a shadow that was stronger than the substance that surrounded it. Jeovill talked long and hurriedly of his late travels, of the vast Siberian forests and rivers, the desolate tundras, the lakes and marshes where the wild swans rear their broods, the flower carpet of the summer fields,

and the winter ice mantled of Rusha's northern sea. He talked as a man talks who avoids the subject that is uppermost in his mind and in the mind of his hearer, as one who looks away from a wound or deformity that is too cruel to be taken notice of. Tea was served in a long oak paneled gallery where generations of musselfords had romped and played as children, and remained yet in effigy, in a collection of more or less faithful portraits.

After Tea, Yovil was taken by his hostess to the Aviaries, which constituted the sole claim which Tory would possessed to being considered a show place. The third Earl of gray Martin had collected rare and interesting birds. Somewhere about the time when Gilbert White was penning the last of his Deathless letters and his successors

in the title had perpetuated the hobby. Little lawns and ponds and shrubberies were partitioned off for the various ground loving species, and higher cages with interlacing perches and rockwood shelves accommodated the birds, whose natural expression of movement was on the wing. Quails and francolins scurried about under low growing shrubs. Peacock pheasants strutted and sunned themselves. Pugnacious ruffs engaged in perfunctory battles from force of habit.

Now that the rivalry of the mating season was over, chaffs, ravens and loud throated gulls occupied sections of a vast rockery, and bright hued Chinese pond herons and delicately stepping egrets waded among the water lilies of a marble terraced tank. One or two dusky shapes seen dimly in the recesses of a large cage built round a hollow tree would be lively owls. When the evening came on.

In the course of his many wanderings. Jovill had himself contributed three or four inhabitants to this little feathered town, and he went round the enclosures, renewing old acquaintances and examining new editions. The falcon cage is empty, said Lady gray Martin, pointing to a large wid dome that towered high above the other enclosures. I let the lana fly free one day. The other birds may be reconciled to their comfortable quarters and abundant food and absence of dangers.

But I don't think all those things could make up to a falcon for the wild range of cliff and desert. When one has lost one's own liberty, one feels a quicker sympathy for other caged things. I suppose there was silence for a moment, and then the dowager went on in a wistful, passionate voice. I am an old woman, now, Mary, I must die in my cage. I haven't the strength to fight. Age is a very real and cruel thing, though we may shut our eyes to it and pretend

it is not there. I thought at one time that I should never really know what it meant, what it brought to one I thought of it as a messenger that one could keep waiting out in the yard till the very last moment. I know now what it means. But you will marry. You are young, you can fight. Are you going to be a fighter or the very humble servant of the Peter Compli? I shall never be the servant

of the faith a Compli, said Yovil. I loathe it. As to fighting, one must first find out what weapon to use and how to use it effectively. One must watch and wait. One must not wait too long, said the old woman. Time is on their side, not ours. It is the young people we must fight for now. If they are ever to fight for us, a new generation will spring up, a weaker memory of old glories will survive the eCloud. The ruling race will capture young imaginations.

If I had your youth, Malley, and your sex, I would become a commercial traveler. A commercial traveler, exclaimed Jovil, Yes, one whose business took him up and down the country into contact with all classes, into homes and shops and inns and railway carriages. And as I traveled, I would work work on the minds of every boy and girl. I came across every young father and young mother too, every young couple that were going

to be man and wife. I would awaken or keep alive in their memory the things that we have been, the grand, brave things that some of our race have done, and I would stir up a longing, a determination for the future that we must win back. I would be a counter agent to the agents of the Beata Compli. In course of time, the government would find out what I was doing, and I should be sent out of the country. But I should have accomplished something, and others would carry on

the work. That is what I would do, Murray, even if it is to be a losing battle, fight it, Fight it. Yovill knew that the old lady was fighting her last battle, rallying the discouraged and spurring on the backward. A footman came to announce that the carriage waited to take him back to the station. His hostess walked with him through the hall and came out on to the stone flag terrace, the terrace from which a former

lady gray Martin had watched the twinkling bonfires that told of Waterloo. Yovil said goodbye to her as she stood there. A Wan, shrunken shadow, yet with the greater strength and reality in her flickering life than those parrot men and women that fluttered and chattered through London drawing rooms and theater foyers. As the carriage swung round a bend in the drive, Yovil looked back at Torywood, a lone gray building in the midst of the sleeping landscape. An old,

pleading voice was still ringing in his ears. Imperious and yet forlorn, came through the silence of the trees, the echoes of a golden horn calling to distances. Somehow, Yovil knew that he would never hear that voice again, and he knew too that he would hear it always with its message be a fighter. And he knew, now, with a shameful consciousness that sprang suddenly

into existence, that the summons would sound for him in vain. The weary brain, torturing months of fever had left their trail behind, a lassitude of spirit and a sluggishness of blood, the quenching of the desire to roam and court, adventure and hardship. In the hours of waking and depression between the raging intervals of delirium. He had speculated with a sort of detached, listless indifference on the chances of his getting back to life and strength and energy.

The prospect of filling a corner of some lonely Siberian graveyard or Finnish cemetry had seemed near realization at times, and for a man who was already half dead, the other half did not particularly matter. But when he had allowed himself to dwell on the more hopeful side of the case, it had always been

a complete recovery that awaited him. The same yovil as of Yore, a little thinner and more lined about the eyes, perhaps, would go through life in the same way, alert, resolute, enterprising, ready to start off at short notice for some desert or upland where the eagles were circling and the wild fowl were calling. He had not reckoned that death evaded and held off by the doctor's skill might exact a compromise, and that only part of the

man would go free to the west. And now he began to realize how little of mental and physical energy he could count on. His own country had never seemed in his eyes so comfort yielding and to be desired as it did now. When it had passed into alien keeping and become a prison land as much as a homeland. London, with its thin mockery of a season and its chattering horde of empty hearted self seekers, held no attraction for him.

But the spell of English country life was weaving itself round him, now that the charm of the desert was receding into a mist of memories, the waning of pleasant autumn days in an English woodland, the whir of game birds in the clean harvested fields, the gray, moist mornings in the saddle with the magical cry of hounds coming up from some misty hollow, and then the delicious abandon of physical weariness in bathroom and bedroom after a long run, and the

heavenly snatched hour of luxurious sleep before stirring back to life and hunger, the coming of the dinner hour, and the jollity of a well chosen house party. That was the call which was competing with that other trumpet call, and the oval knew on which side his choice would incline end of chapter thirteen, Chapter fourteen of When William Came by Sake. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer,

please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Imenta, When William came by Sarkee, Chapter fourteen, A perfectly glorious afternoon. It was one of the last days of July. Cooled and freshened by a touch of rain, and dropping back again to a languorous warmth, London looked at its summer best, rainwashed and sunlit, with the maximum of coming and going in its more fashionable streets. Cicily Yoville sat in a screened alcove of the Anchorage Restaurant,

a feeding ground which had lately sprung into favor. Opposite her sat Ronnie, confronting the ruins of what had been a dish of prawns in aspec Cool and clean and fresh colored, he was good to look on in the eyes

of his companion. And yet perhaps there was a ruffle in her soul that called for some answering disturbance on the part of that superbly, tranquil young man, and certainly called in vain Cecily had set up for herself a fetish of onyx, with eyes of jade, and doubtless hungered at times with an unreasonable but perfectly natural hunger for something of flesh and blood. It was the religion of her life to know exactly what she wanted and to see that she got

it. But there was no possible guarantee against her occasionally experiencing a desire for something else. It is the golden rule of all religions that no one should really live up to their precepts. When a man observes the principle of his religion too exactly, he is in immediate danger of founding a new sect. To day is going to be your day of triumph, said Cecily to the young man, who was wondering at the moment whether he would care to embark

on an artitoke. I believe I'm more nervous than you are, she added, And yet I rather hate the idea of your scoring a great success, Why, asked Ronnie, diverting his mind for a moment from the attitude question and its ramifications of source on on days or Venegre. I like you as you are, said Cecily, just a nice looking boy to flatter and spoil and pretend to be fond of. You've got a charming young body, and you've no soul, and that such a fascinating combination. If you had a

soul, you would either dislike or worship me. And I'd much rather have things as they are. And now you're going to go step beyond that, and other people will applaud you and say that you're wonderful and invite you to eat with them, and motor with them and yacht with them. Soon as that begins to happen, Ronnie, a lot of other things will come to an end. Of course, I've always known that you don't really care for me, But as soon as the world knows it, you're irrevocably damaged as

a plaything. That is the great secret that binds us together, the knowledge that we have no real affection for one another. And this afternoon every one will know that you're a great artist, and no great artist was ever a great lover. I shall be difficult to replace. Anyway, said Ronnie,

with what he imagined was a becoming modesty. There are lots of boys standing round, ready to be fed and flattered and put on an imaginary pedestal, most of them more or less good looking and well turned out, and amusing to talk to. Oh, I daresay I could find a success of your vacated niche said Cecily. Lightly. One thing I'm determined on. Though he shan't be a musician. It's so unsatisfactory to have to share a grand passion

with the grand piano. He shall be a delightful young barbarian who would think saurs Oles was a Derby winner or a claret. Don't be in too much of a hurry to replace me, said Ronnie, who did not care to have his successor too seriously discussed. I may not score the success you expect. This afternoon, my dear boy, a minor crowned head from across the sea is coming to hear you play, and that alone will count as a

success with most of your listeners. Also, I have secured a real duchess for you, which is rather an achievement in the London of to day an English duchess, asked Ronnie, who early in life learnt to apply the Merchandise Marks Act to ducal titles English. Oh, certainly, as far as the title goes, she was born under the constellation of the star spangled banner. Who I don't suppose the Duke approves of her being here, lending her countenance

to the fate. A compli. But when you've got Republican blood in your veins, a kaiser is quite as a tract of a load star as a king rather more so. And Canon mousepace is coming, continued Cecily, referring to a closely written list of guests. The excellent von Torb has been attending his church lately, and the Cannon is longing to meet her. She is

just the sort of person he adores. I fancy he sincerely realizes how difficu it will be for the rich to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and he tries to make up for it by being as nice as possible to them in this world. Ronnie held out his hand for the list. I think you know most of the others, said Cecily, passing it to him. Lieutenant von Gabel wrote, read out, Ronnie, who is he in one of the whose are regiments quartered here? A friend of the Gryffins, Ugly but

amiable, and I'm told good cross country rider. I suppose Mary will be disgusted at meeting the utlard and visible sign under his roof, but these encounters are inevitable as long as he is in London. I didn't know Murray was coming, said Ronnie. I believe he's going to look in on us, said Cecily. It's just as well, you know, otherwise we should have Joan asking in her loudest voice when he was going to be back in England again. I haven't asked her, but she overheard the Gryffin arranging to come

and hear you play. And I fancy that will be quite enough. Now, how about some Turkish coffee, said Ronnie, who had decided against the art joke. Turkish coffee, certainly, and a cigarette and a moment's peast before the serious business of the afternoon claims us talking about peace. Do you know, Ronnie, it has just occurred to me that we have left out one of the most important things in our affair. We have never had a quarrel. I hate quarrels, said Ronnie. They're so domesticated. That's the

first time I've ever heard you talk about your home, said Cecily. I fancy it would apply to most homes, said Ronnie. The last boyfriend I had used to quarrel furious with me at least once a week, said Cecily reflectively. But then he had dark, slumberous eyes that lit up magnificently when he was angry, So it would have been a sure waste of God's good gifts not to have sent him into a passion. Now and then, with your excur into the past and future, you're making me feel dreadfully like an

installment of a serial novel, protested Ronnie. We have now got to synopsis of earlier chapters. It shan't be teased, said Cecide. We will live in the present and go no further into the future than to make arrangements for Tuesday's dinner party. I have asked the Duchess. She would never have forgiven me if she'd found out that I had a crowned head dining with me and

hadn't asked her to meet him. A sudden hush descended on the company gathered in the Great Drawing Room at Berkshire Street as Ronnie took his seat at the piano. The voice of Cannon Mousepace outlasted the others for a moment or so,

and then subsided into a regretful but gracious silence. For the next nine or ten minutes, Ronnie held possession of the crowded room, a tense, slender figure with cold green eyes aflame in a sudden fire and smooth, burnished head bent low over the keyboard that yielded a disciplined out of melody under his strong, deft fingers. The world weary Landgraf forgot for the moment the regrettable

trend of his subjects towards parliamentary socialism. The excellent Kaifn von tob forgot all that the Cannon had been saying to her for the last ten minutes, forgot the depressing certainty that he would have a great deal more that he wanted to say in the immediate future, over and above the thirty five minutes or so of discourse that she would contract to listen to next Sunday, And Cecily listened with the wistful, equivocal triumph of one whose goose has turned out to be

a swan, and who realizes with secret concern that she has only planned the role of goose girl for herself. The last chords died away, the fire faded out of the jade colored eyes, and Ronnie became once more a well groomed youth in a drawing room full of well dressed people. But around him rose an explosive clamor of applause and congratulation, the sincere tribute of a siation, and the equally hearty expression of imitative homage. It's a great gift,

A great gift, chanted cannon Mousepace. You must put it to a great use. A talent is vouchsafed to us for a purpose. You must fulfill the purpose. Talent such as yours is a responsibility. You must meet that responsibility. The dictionary of the English language was an inexhaustible quarry from which the cannon her hewn and fashion for himself a great reputation. Your must common Clavid me Aus Scharsenburg said the kindly face to Landgraft, whom the world adored,

and thought it in about equal proportions. Eh Christmas, yea, this will be a good time. Vie still keeps the Christ's fist at Schlassenburg. Order, Sawsie, keep telling our school children that it is only your Christ meath never mind. I will have as a wise president of our land atout to listen to you. He is a soutsie. We are good friends. Outsides of Parliament House. You shall blate to him my good friend, and convince him that that right have got in heaven, you will come. Yes,

its beautiful, said the Greffin, Simply it's made me cry. Go back to the piano again, place at once. Perhaps the near neighborhood of the cannon inspired this command, but the Gryffin had been genuinely charmed. She adored good music, and she was unaffectedly fond of good looking boys. Ronnie went back to the piano and tasted the matured pleasure of her repeated success. Any measure of nervousness that he may have felt at first had completely passed away.

He was sure of his audience, and he played as though they did not exist. A renewed clamor of excited approval attended the conclusion of his performance. It's a triumph, A perfectly glorious triumph, exclaimed the Duchess of Draycia, turning to Yeovil, who sat silent among his wife's guests. Isn't it just glorious? She demanded, with heavy insistent intonation of the word. Is it, said Yovil, Well, isn't it, she cried with a rising inflection.

Isn't it just perfectly glorious? I don't know, confessed Yovil, your see, glory hasn't come very much my way lately. Then, before he exactly realized what he was doing, he raised his voice and quoted loudly for the benefit of half the room. Other romans shall arise, heedless of a soldier's name, sounds, not deeds, shall win the prize, harmony, the path to aim. There was a sort of shiver of surprised silence at Yovil's end of the room. Hell, the word rang out in a strong,

young voice. Hell, and it's true. That's the worst of it. It is damned true. Yovil turned with some dozen others to see who was responsible for this vigorously expressed statement. Tony Luton confronted him, an angry scowl on his face, ablaze in his heavy, lidid eyes. The boy was without a conscience, almost without a soul, as priests and parsons reconcoles, But there was a slumbering devil god within him, and Jovil's taunting words

had broken the slumber. Life had been for Tony a hard school in which right and wrong, high endeavor, and good resolve were untaught subjects. But there was a sterling something in him, just that something that helped poor street scavenged men to die brave fronted deaths in the trenches of Salamanca, that fired a handful of apprentice boys to shut the gates of dairy and stare unflinchingly at

grim leguer and starvation. It was just that nameless something that was lacking in the young musician, who stood at the further end of the room, bathed in a flood of compliment and congratulation. Enjoying the honey drops of his triumph, Luton pushed his way through the crowd and left the room, without traveling to take leave of his hostess. What a strange young man, exclaimed the Duchess. Now, do take me into the next room, She went on,

almost in the same breath. I'm just dying for some iced coffee. Yovil escorted her through the throng of Ronnie worshippers to the desired haven of refreshment. Marvelous missus Menteith Mendelssohn was exclaiming, in ringing trumpet tones. Of course I always knew he could play, But this is not mere piano playing. It is tone mastery. It is sound magic. Missus Yeovil has introduced us

to a new star in the musical firmament. Do you know I feel this afternoon just like Cortez in the poem gazing at the newly discovered sea, silent upon a peak? In Darien quoted a penetrate voice that could only belong to Joan Mardle. I say, can anyone picture missus menteith Mendelsohn, silent on any peak, or under any circumstances, If anyone had that measure of imagination,

no one acknowledged the fact a great gift and a great responsibility. Canon Mousepace was assuring the Grayfin, the power of evoking sublime melody is akin to the power of awakening thoughts. A musician can appeal to dormant consciousness as a preacher can appeal to dormant conscience. It is a responsibility, an instrument for good or evil. Our young friend here, we may be sure, will use it as an instrument for good. He has, I feel certain a

sense of his responsibility. Here's a nice boy, said the gryfin, simply he has such pretty hair. In one of the window recesses Rhapsody, Pantril was talking vaguely but beautifully to a small audience on the subject of chromatic chords. She had the advantage of knowing what she was talking about, an advantage that her listeners did not, in the least chair, all through his playing there ran a tone note of malachite green, she declared, recklessly, feeling

safe from immediate contradiction. Malachite green my color, the color of striving. Having satisfied the ruling passion that demanded gentle and dexterous self advertisement, she realized that the Augustus Smith in her craved refreshment, and moved with one of her overorder admirers towards the haven, where peaches and iced coffee might be considered a

certainty. The refreshment alcove, which was really a good sized room, a sort of chapel of ease to the larger drawing room, was already packed with a crowd who felt that they could best discuss Ronie's triumph between mouthfuls of fruit salad and iced drafts of hot cup. So brief is human glory that two or three independent souls had even now drifted from the theme of the moment on other more personally interesting topics. Iced mulberry salad, my dear it's a speciality

de la maisan, so to speak. They say the riving husband brought the recipe from Astrakhan or Seville or some such outlandish place. Now, I wish my husband would roam about a bit and bring back strange pellet of dishes. No such luck. She's got asthma and has to keep on a gravel soil with a south aspect, and all sorts of other restrictions. I don't think you ought to be pitied in the least. The husband with asthma is like a captive golf ball who could always put your hand on him when you want

him. All the hangings violet the palm, or in the furniture rosewood. Nothing is to be played in it except Mozart. Mozart only. Some of my friends wanted me to have a replica of the Mozart statue at Vienna put up in a corner of the room, with flowers always around it. But I really couldn't. I couldn't. One is so tired of it, one sees it everywhere. I couldn't do it. I'm like that, you know.

Yes, I've secured the hero of the hour Ronnie's Store. Oh yes, Rather, he's going to join our yachting trip third week of August. We're going as far afield as fuel men in the Adriatic. Nor is it the Aegean? Won't it beat jolly? Oh no, we're not asking missus. Yeovil is quite a small lot, you know, at least it's a small party. The excellent Fontalbe took her departure, bearing off with her the Landglarf, who had already settled the date and duration of Ronnie's Christmas visit.

It will be done, you know, he warned the prospective guest. Our landtag will not be sitting. And what is a bear garden without the bears? However, we have some valad shrine in our woods. We consure you're some sport in that way. Ronnie instantly saw himself in a well fitting shooting costume with a terrelle's hat placed at a very careful angle on his head, but he confessed that the other details of bore hunting were rather beyond him.

With the departure of the von Toal party, cannon mousepace gravitated decently but persistently towards a corner where the Duchess, still at concert pitch, was alternatively praising Ronnie's performance and the mulberry salad. Joan Mardle, who formed one of the group, was not openly praising any one, but she was paying a silent tribute to the salad. We were just talking about ronnie Stores music, Cannon said the Duchess. I consider it just perfectly glorious. It's a great talent,

isn't it, Cannon put in Joan briskly. And of course it's a responsibility as well. Don't you think music can be such an influence, just as eloquence can. Don't you agree with me? The quarry of the English language was, of course a public property, but it was disconcerting to have one's own particular barrel load of sentence building material carried off before one's eyes.

The Cannon's impressive homily on Ronnie's gift, its possibilities had to be hastily whittled down to a weakly acquiescent Quite so, Quite so if you tasted this ice mowberry salad, Cannon asked the Duchess, it's perfectly luscious. Just hurry along and get some before it's all gone. And her grace hurried along in an opposite direction to thank Cicily for past favors, and to express lively gratitude for the Tuesday to come. The guests departed with a rather irritating slowness, for

which perhaps the excellence of Cicily's buffet arrangements was partly responsible. The great drawing room seemed to grow larger and more oppressive as the human wave receded, and the hostess fled at last with some relief to the narrower limits of her writing room and the sedative influences of a cigarette. She was inclined to be sorry for herself. The triumph of the afternoon had turned out much as she had

predicted. At lunch time. Her idol of Onyx had not been swept from its pedestal, but the atoll itself had an air of being packed up, ready for transport to some other temple. Ronnie would be flattered and spoiled by half a hundred people just because he could conjure sounds out of a keyboard, and Cicily felt no great incentive to go on flattering and spoiling him herself. And Ronnie would acquiesce in his dismissal with the good grace born of indifference.

The surest guaranteur of perfect manners. Already he had social engagements for the coming months in which she had no share. The drifting apart would be mutual. He had been an intelligent and amusing companion, and he had played the game as she had wished it to be played, without the fatigue of keeping up pretenses which neither of them could have believed in. Let us have a wonderfully good time together had been the single stipulation in their unwritten treaty of comradeship,

and they had had the good time. Their wholehearted pursuit of material happiness would go on as keenly as before, but they would hunt in different company. That was all, Yes, that was all. Cecily found the effect of her cigarette less seditative than she was disposed to exact. It might be necessary

to change the brand. Some ten or eleven days later, Yeoville read an announcement in the papers that, in spite of handsome offers who increased salary, mister Tony Luton, the original singer of the popular ditty Eccleston Square, had terminated his engagement with Messrs Isaac Grovenor and Leon Harp, Heart of the Caravansary Theater, and signed on as a deck hand in the Canadian Marine. Perhaps, after all there had been some shred of glory amid the trumpet triumph of

that July afternoon. End of chapter fourteen. Chapter fifteen of When William Came By Sarkee. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee, Chapter fifteen, The Intelligent Anticipator of wants. Two of Yeoville's London clubs, the two that he had been accustomed to frequent had closed their doors after the catastrophe. One

of them had perished from off the face of the earth. Its fittings had been sold, and its papers lay stored in some solicitor's office, a titbit of material for the pain of some future historian. The other had transplanted itself to Delhi, whither it had removed its early Georgian furniture and its traditions, and sought to reproduce its Saint James's Street atmosphere as nearly as the conditions of

a tropic Asiatic city would permit. There remained the cart Wheel, a considerably newer institution which had sprung into existence somewhere about the time of Yovil's last sojourn in England. He had joined it on the solicitation of a friend who was interested in the venture, and his bankers had paid his subscription during his absence.

As he had never been inside its doors, there could be no depressing comparisons to make between its present state and a four time Glories, and Yovil turned into its portals one afternoon with the adventurous detachment of a man who breaks new ground and challenges new experiences. He entered with a diffident sense of intrusion, conscious that his standing as a member might not be recognized by the keepers

of the doors. In a moment, however, he realized that a rajah's escort of elephants might almost have marched through the entrance hall and vestibule without challenge.

The general atmosphere of the scene suggested a blend of the railway a station at Cologne, the hotel Bristol in any European capital, and the second act in most musical comedies, a score of brilliant and brilliantine pages decorated the foreground, while Hebraic looking gentlemen wearing tartan waistcoats of the clans of their adoption flitted restlessly between the tape machines and telephone boxes. The army of occupation had obviously

established a firm footing in the hospitable premises. A kaleidoscopic pattern of uniforms sky blue, indico and bottle green relieved the civilian attire of the groups that clustered in lounge and card rooms and corridors. Yeoville rapidly came to the conclusion that the joys of membership were not for him. He had turned to go after a very cursory inspection of the premises and their human occupants, when he was hailed by a young man dressed with strenuous neatness, whom he remembered having met

in past days at the houses of one or two common friends. Hubert Hurlton's parents had brought him into the world, and some twenty one years later had put him into a motor business. Having taken these pardonable liberties, they had completely exhausted their ideas of what to do with him, and Hubert seemed unlikely to develop any ideas of his own on the subject. The motor business elected

to conduct itself without his connivance. Journalism, the stage, tomato culture without capital, and other professions that could be entered on at short notice were submitted to his consideration by nimble minded relations and friends. He listened to their suggestions with polite indifference, being rude only to a cousin who demonstrated how he might achieve a settled income of from two hundred to a thousand pounds a year by

the propagation of mushrooms in a London basement. While his walk in life was still an undetermined promenade, his parents died, leaving him with a carefully invested income of thirty seven pounds a year at that point of his career. Yovil's knowledge of him stopped short. The journey to Siberia had taken him beyond the range of Hurlton's domestic vicissitude. The young man greeted him in a decidedly friendly

manner. I didn't know you were a member here, he exclaimed. It's the first time I've ever been in the club, said Yovil, and I fancy it will be the last. There's rather too much of the fighting machine in evidence here. One doesn't want a perpetual reminder of what has happened staring one in the face. We tried at first to keep the alien element out, said Hurlton apologetically. But we couldn't have carried on the club if we'd stuck to that line. You see, we'd lost more than two thirds of

our old members, so we couldn't afford to be exclusive. As a matter of fact, the whole thing was decided over our heads. A new syndicate took over the concern, and a new committee was installed, with a good many foreigners on it. And it's horrid having these uniforms flaunting all over the place. But what is one to do? Yovil said nothing, with the air of a man who could have said a great deal. I suppose you

wonder why remain a member under those conditions, continued Hurlton. Well, as far as I'm concerned, a place like this is a necessity for me. In fact, it's my profession, my source of income. I as good at bridge as all that asked Yeovil. I'm a fairly successful player myself, But I should be sorry to have to live on my winnings year in year out. I don't play cards, said Hurlton, at least not for serious stakes. My winnings all loosings wouldn't come to a tenor in an average year.

No. I live by commissions by introducing likely buyers to would be sellers. Sell out of what asked yobil anything everything, horses, yachts, old masters, play, shooting, poetry, farms, weekend cottages, motor cars, almost anything you can think of. Look, and he produced from his

breast pocket a bulky notebook illusually inscribed engagements. Here, he explained, tapping the book, I've got a double entry of every likely client that I know, with a note of the things he may have to sell and the things he may want to buy when it's something that he has for sale, or a cross references to likely purchases of that particular line of article. I don't limit myself to things that I actually know people to be in want of.

I go further than that and have theories, carefully indexed theories as to the things that people might want to buy at the right moment if I can get the opportunity I mentioned the article that's in my mind's eye, and the possible purchaser who has also been in my mind's eye, and I frequently bring off a sale. I started a chance acquaintance on a career of print buying the other day merely by telling him of a couple of good prints I know of

that were to be had at a quite reasonable price. He's a man with more money than he knows what to do with, and he has laid out a lot on Old Prince since his first purchase. Most of his collection he's got through me, And of course I net a commission on each transaction. So you see, old man, how useful, not to say necessary, a club with a large membership is. To me, the more mixed and socially chaotic it is, the more serviceable it is, of course, said

Yeovil. And I suppose, as a matter of fact, a good many of your clients belong to the conquering race. Well you see there the people who have got the money, said Hurlton. I don't mean to say that the invading Germans are usually people of wealth, but while they live over here they escape the crushing taxation that falls on the British worn subject. They serve their country as soldiers, and we have to serve it in garrison money,

ship money and so forth. Besides the ordinary taxes of the state. The German shoulders the rifle. The Englishman has to shoulder everything else. That's what will help more than anything towards the gradual Germanizing of our big town. The comparatively lightly tax German workmen over here will have a much bigger spending power and purchasing power than his heavily taxed English neighbor. The public houses, bars, eating houses, places of amusements and so forth will come to cater more and

more for many yielding German patronage. The stream of British emigration will swell rather than diminish, and the stream of Teuton immigration will be equally persistent and progressive. Yes, the military service ordinance was a cunning stroke on the part of that old fox von Karal. As a civilian statesman, he's far and away cleverer than Bismarck was. He smothers with a feather bed where Bismarck would have tried to smash with a snedge hammer. Have you got me down on your

list of noteworthy people? Asked Jobil, turning the drift of the conversation back to the personal topic. Certainly I have, said Hurlton, turning the pages of his pocket directory to the letter. Why as soon as I knew you were back in England, I made several entries concerning you. In the first place, it was possible that you might have a volume on Siberian travel and natural history notes to publish, And I've cross referenced you to a publisher I

know who rather wants books of that sort on his list. I may tell you at once, and I've no intentions in that direction, said Yeovil in some amusement. Just as well, said Hurlton, cheerfully scribbling a hieroglyphic in his book, that branch of business is rather outside my line, too little in it, and the gratitude of author and publisher for being introduced to one

another as usually short lived. A most serious entry was the item that if you were wintering in England you would be looking out for a hunter or two you used to hunt with the East Wessex. I remember, I've got just a very animal that will suit that country ready waiting for you, a beautiful clean jumper. I put it over a fence or two myself and you and I ride much the same way. A stiffish price is being asked for it. But I've got the letters d O after your name in Heaven's Name,

said Yovil, now openly grinning before I die of curiosity. Tell me what d O stands for. It means someone who doesn't object to pay a good price for anything that really suits him. There are some people, of course, who won't consider a thing unless they can get it for about a third of what they imagine to be its market value. I've got another suggestion down against you in my book. You may not be staying in the country at

all. You may be clearing out in disgust at existing conditions. In that case, you would be selling a lot of things that you wouldn't want to cart away with you. That involves another set of entries and a whole lot of cross references. I'm afraid I've given you a lot of trouble, said Yovill dryly. Not at all, said Hurlton. But it would simplify matters if we take it for granted that you're going to stay here for this winter anyhow, and are looking out for hunters. Can you lunch with me?

Here on Wednesday and come and look at the animal afterwards. It's only thirty five minutes by train. It will take us longer if we motor. There is a two fifty three from charing Cross that we could catch comfortably. If you're going to persuade me to hunt in the East Wessex country this season, said Yovil, you must find me a convenient hunting box somewhere down there. I have found it, cried Hurlton, whipping out a styleograph and hastily scribbling

an order to view on a card. Central as possible for all the meats, grand stabling, accommodation, excellent water supply, big bathroom, game larder, celler ridge, a bake house if you want to bake your own bread. Any land with it not enough to be a nuisance. An acre or two of padderk, and about the same of garden. You're fond of wild things. The wood comes down to the edge of the garden, a wood that harbors owls and buzzards and kestrels. Have you got all those details in

your book, asked Yovil. Wood adjoining property b K. I keep those details in my head, said Hurlton. But they're quite reliable. I shall insist on something substantial off the rent if there are no buzzards, said Yovil. Now that you mention them, they seem an indispensable accessory to any decent hunting box. Look, he exclaimed, catching sight of a plump, middle aged individual crossing the vestibule with an air of restrained importance. There goes a

delectable piphebe. Does he come on your books at all? I should say, exclaimed Hurlton fervently. The delectable p nourishes expectations of a barony or viscounty. At an early date, most of his life has been spent in streets and squares, with occasional migrations to the esplanades of fashionable watering places or the graveled walks of country house gardens. Now that no bless is about to impose its obligations on him, quite a new catalog of wants as sprang into his

mind. There are things that the plainest choir may leave undone without causing scandalized remark. But a fiercer light beats on a baron trigger pulling is one of the obligations up to the present. Pithoby's never hit a partridge in anger. But this year he's commissioned me to rent him a deer forest, some pedigree hair efforts for his home farm. Was another commission, and a dozen and a half swans for a swanery. Swanery, I may say was my idea.

I said once in his hearing, that it gave a baronial air to an estate. You see, I knew a man who'd got a lot of surplus swan stock for sale. Now Pithoby wants a heronry as well. I've put him in communication with a client of mine who suffers from superfluous herons. But of course I can't guarantee that the bird's nesting arrangements will fall in with his territorial requirement. I'm getting him some carp too, of quite respectable age.

For a carp pond. I thought it would look so well for his lady wife to be discovered by interviewers feeing the carp with her own fair hands. And I put the same idea into bith Ofby's mind. I had no idea that so many things were necessary to endorse a pattern of nobility, said Yovil. If there should be any miscarriage in the bestow of the honor at

least bitherby will who absolved himself from any charge of contributory negligence. Shall we say Wednesday here one o'clock, lunch first, and go down and look at the horse afterwards, said Hurlton, returning to the matter in mind. Yovil hesitated. Then he nodded his head. There's no harm in going to look at the animal, he said. End of chapter fifteen. Chapter sixteen of When William Came By Saki. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings

are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to librevox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee, Chapter sixteen Sunrise. Missus Kerrick sat at a little teakwood table in the verandah of a low pitched teak built house that stood on the steep slope of a

brown hillside. Her youngest child, with the grave natural dignity of nine year old girlhood, maintained a correct but observant silence, looking carefully yet unobtrusively after the wants of the one guest, and checking from time to time the incursions of ubiquitous ants that were obstinately disposed to treat the tablecloth as a foraging ground.

The wayfaring visitor, who was experiencing a British blend of Eastern hospitality, was a French naturalist, traveling thus far Afield in quest of feathered specimens to

enrich the aviaries of a bird collecting Balkan king. On the previous evening, while shrugging his shoulders and unloosing his vocabulary over the meager accommodation afforded by the native rest house, he had been enchanted by receiving an invitation to transfer his quarters to the house on the hillside, where he found not only a pleasant voice hostess and some drinkable wine, but three brown skinned English youngsters who were

able to give him a mass of intelligent, first hand information about the bird life of the region. And now, at the early morning breakfast ere the sun was showing over the rim of the brown baked hills, he was learning something of the life of the little community he had chanced on. It was in these parts many years ago, explained the hostess, When my husband was alive and had an appointment out here. It is a healthy hill district and

I had pleasant memories of the place. So when it became necessary, well desirable, let us say, to leave our English home and find a new one, it occurred to me to bring my boys and my little girl here. My eldest girl is at school in Paris. Labor is cheap here, and I try my hand at farming. In a small way. Of course, it is very different work to just superintending the dairy and poultry yard arrangements

of an English country estate. There are so many things insect ravages, bird depredations and so on that one only knows on a small scale in England that happen here in wholesale fashion, not to mention droughts and torrential rains and other tropical visitations. And then the domestic animals are so disconcertingly different from the ones one has been used to. Humped cattle never seem to behave in the way that straight backed cattle would, and goats and geese and chickens are not a

bit the same here that they are in Europe. And of course the farm's servants are utterly unlike the same class in England. One has to unlearn a great deal of what one thought one knew about stock keeping and agriculture, and take notes of the native ways of doing things. They're primitive and surprising, of course, but they have an accumulated store of experience behind them, and

one has to tread warily in initiating improvements. The Frenchman looked round at the brown sun scorched hills, with the dusty empty road showing here and there in the middle distance, and other brown sun scorched hills rounding off the scene. He looked at the lizards on the veranda walls, at the jars for keeping the water cool, at the numberless little insect board holes in the furniture,

at the heat drawn lines on his hostess's comely face. Notwithstanding his present wanderings, he had a Frenchman's strong homing instinct, and he marveled to hear this lady, who should have been a lively and popular figure in the social circle of some English country town, talking serenely of the ways of humped cattle and native servants. And your children, how do they like the change? He

asked? Is healthy up here among the hills? Said the mother, also looking round at the landscape and thinking doubtless of a very different scene they have an outdoor life and plenty of liberty. They have their ponies to ride, and there is a lake up above us that's a fine place for them to bathe and boat in. The three boys are there now having their morning swim.

The eldest is sixteen, and he's allowed to have a gun, and there's some good wildfowl shooting to be had in the reed beds at the further end of the lake. I think that part of the joy of his shooting expeditions lies in the fact that many of the duck and plover that he comes

across belonged to the same species that frequent our English moors and rivers. It was the first hint that she had given of a wistful sense of exile, the yearning for other skies, the message that a dead bird's plumage could bring across rolling seas and scorching plains, and the education of your boys. How do you manage for that, asked the visitor. There's a young tutor living

out in these wilds, said missus Kerrick. He was assistant master at a private school in Scotland, but it had to be given up when ah, when things changed, so many of the boys left the country. He came out to an uncle who has a small estate eight miles from here, and three days in the week he rides over to teach my boys, and three days he goes to another family living in the opposite direction. Today he is

due to come here. It's a great boom to have such an opportunity for getting the boys educated, and of course it helps him to earn a living and the society of the place, asked the Frenchman. His hostess laughed, I must admit that it has to be looked for with a strong pair of field glasses. She said. It's almost as difficult to get a good bridge four together as it would have been to get up a tennis tournament or a

subscription dance. In our particular corner of England. One has to ignore distances and forget fatigue if one wants to be gregarious, even on a limited scale. There are one or two officials who are our chief social mainstays. But the difficulty is to muster the few available souls under the same roof at the same moment. A road will be impassable in one quarter, a pony will be lame in another, a stress of work will prevent someone else from a

coming, and another may be down with a touch of fever. When my little girl gave a birthday party here, her only little girl guest had to come twelve miles to attend it. The forest officer happened to drop in on us that evening, so we felt quite festive. The Frenchman's eyes grew round

in wonder. He had once thought that the capital city of a Balkan kingdom was the uttermost limit of social desolation viewed from a Parisian standpoint, and there, at any rate one could get cafe chantins, tennis, picnic parties, and occasional theater performance by a foreign troop, now and then a traveling circus, not to speak of court and diplomatic functions of a more or less sociable

character. Here, it seems, one went on a day's journey to reach an evening's entertainment, and the chance arrival of a tard official took on the nature of a festivity. He looked round again at the rolling stretches of brown hills. Before he had regarded them merely as the background to this little, shut away world. Now he saw that they were the foreground as well.

They were everything. There was nothing else. And again his glance traveled to the face of his hostess, with its bright, pleasant eyes and smiling mouth. An you live here with your children, he said. In here, in this wilderness, you'll leave England. You'll leave everything for this. His hostess rose and took him over to the far side of the verandah. The beginnings of a garden were spread out before them, with young fruit trees and

flowering shrubs, and bushes of pale, pink roses. Exuberant tropical growths were interspersed with carefully tended vestiges of plants that had evidently been brought in from a more temperate climate and had not borne the transition. Well bushes and trees and shrubs away for some distance, to where the ground rose in a small hillock, and then fell abruptly into bare hillside. In all this garden that you

see, said the englishwoman, there is one tree that is sacred. A tree, said the Frenchman, a tree that we could not grow in England. The Frenchman followed the direction of her eyes and saw a tall, bare pole at the summit of the hillock. At the same moment, the sun came over the hilltops in a deep orange glow, and a new light stole like magic over the brown landscape, and as if they had timed their arrival to the exact moment of sunburst, three brown faced boys appeared under the straight

bare pole. A cord shivered and flapped, and something ran swiftly up into the air and swung out in the breeze that blew across the hills, a blue flag with red and white crosses. The three boys bared their heads, and the small girl on the veranda steps stood rigidly to attention. Far away down the hill, a young man cantering into view round the corner of a dusty road, removed his hat in loyal salutation. That is why we live

out here, said the englishwoman quietly. End of chapter sixteen. Chapter seventeen of When William Came By Sake. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Iminta, When William Came By Sarkee, Chapter seventeen, The event of the season in the first swelter room

of the new Osmanly Baths in cork Street. Four or five recumbent individuals, in a state of moist nudity and self respecting inertia, were smoking cigarettes or making occasional pretense of reading damp newspapers. A glass wall with a glass door shut them off from the yet more torrid regions of the further swelter chambers.

Another glass partition disclosed the dimly lit vault, where other patrons of the establishment had arrived at the stage of being pounded and kneaded and sluiced by oriental looking attendants. The splashing and trickling of taps, the flip flap of wet slippers on a wet floor, and the low murmur of conversation filtered through glass doors made an appropriately drowsy accompaniment to the scene. A newcomer fluttered into the room, beamed at one of the occupants, and settled himself with an air of

elaborate languor in a long canvas chair. Cornelian Valpy was a fair young man, with perpetual or surprise impinged on his countenance and a chin that seemed to have retired from competition with the rest of his features. The beam of recognition that he had given to his friend or acquaintance, subsided into a subdued but lingering simper. What's the matter, drawled his neighbor, lazily dropping the end of a cigarette into a small bowl of water and helping himself from a silver

case on the table at his side. Matter, said Cornelian, opening wide a pair of eyes in which unhealthy intelligence seemed to struggle in undetermined battle with utter vacuity. Why should you suppose that anything is the matter when you wear a look of idiotic complaisance in a Turkish bath, said the other. It is the more noticeable from the fact that you're wearing nothing else. Were you at the Shalem House danced last night, asked Cornelian, by way of explaining

his air of complaisant retrospection. No, said the other, But I feel as if I had been. I've been reading columns about it in the Dawn, the last event of the season, said Cornelian, and quite one of the most amusing and lively functions that there have been so the Dawn said. But then, as Shalem practically owns and controls that paper, its favorable opinion

might be taken for granted. The whole idea of The revel was quite original, said Cornelian, who was not going to have his personal narrative of the event forestalled by anything that a newspaper reporter might have given to the public. A certain number of guests went as famous personages in the world's history, and each one was accompanied by another guest typifying the prevailing characteristic of that personage. One man went as Julius Caesar, for instance, and had a girl typifying

ambition as his shadow. Another went as Louis the Eleventh and his companion personified superstition. Your shadow had to be some one of the opposite sex, you see, and every alternate danced throughout the evening. You dance with your shadow partner. Quite a clever IDEA young Goth von Schneidelstein is supposed to have invented it. New York will be deeply beholden to him, said the other shadow dances with all manner of eccentric variations. Will be the rage there for the

next eighteen months. Some of the costumes were really sumptuous, continued Cornelian. The Duchess of Draysia was magnificent as Ahaliba. You never saw so many jewels on one person. Only of course she didn't look dark enough for the character. She had Billy concept for her shadow, representing unspeakable depravity on earth.

Did he manage that? Oh? A blend of Beardsley and Baxed as far as get up and costume, and of course his own personality counted for a good deal quite One of the successes of the evening was Lieutenant von Gable, wrought as George Washington, with Joan Mardle as his shadow, typifying inconvenient candor. He put her down officially his truthfulness, but everyone had heard the other version. Oh good forgave alert. Though he does belong to the invading Horde.

It's not often that aim one scores off Joan. Another blaze of magnificence was the loud voice Bessimer woman as the Goddess Juno, with peacock tails and opals all over her. She had Ronnie's Store to represent green eyed jealousy. Talking of ronnie Store and of jealousy, you will naturally wonder who missus Yeovil

went with. Now I forget what her costume was, but she'd got that dark headed youth with her that she's been trotting round everywhere with the last few days, Cornelian's neighbor kicked him furtively on the shin and frowned in the direction of a dark haired youth reclining in an adjacent chair. The youth in question rose from his seat and stalked into the further swelter. So clever of him

to go into the furnace room, said the unabashed Cornelian. Now if he turns scarlet all over, we shall never know how much is embarrassment and how much is due to the process of being boiled. Laoville hasn't done badly by the exchange. He's better looking than Ronnie. I see that Pitherby went as Frederick the Great, said Cornelian's neighbor, fingering a sheet of the dawn. Isn't that exactly what one would have expected Pitherby to do, said Cornelian.

He's so desperately anxious to announce to all whom it may concern that he has written a life of that hero. He had none inspiring looking woman with him supposed to represent military genius. The spirit of advertisement would have been more appropriate, said the other. The opening scene of the revel was rather effective,

continued Cornelian. All the shadow people reclined in the dimly lit center of the ballroom in an indistinguishable mass, and the human characters marched round the illuminated sides of the room to solemn processional music. Every now and then a shadow would detach itself from the mass, hail its partner by name, and glide out to join him or her into procession. Then, when the last shadows had found their mates and everyone was partnered, the lights were turned up into blaze.

The orchestra crashed out a whirl of nondescript dance music, and people just let themselves go. It was pandemonium. Afterwards, everyone strutted about for half an hour or so, showing themselves off. Then the legitimate program of dances began. There were some rather amusing incidents throughout the evening. One set of lancers was danced entirely by the seven Deadly Sins and their human exemplars. Of course, seven couples were not sufficient to make up the set, so they

had to bring in an eighth sin. I forget what it was. The Sins of patriotism would have been rather appropriate considering who were giving the dance, said the other. Hush exclaimed Cornelian nervously. You don't know who may will hear you in a place like this, You'll get yourself into trouble. Wasn't there some rather daring new dance of the bunny hug variety, asked the indiscreet one the cubby cuddle, said Cornelian. Three or four adventurous couples danced it

towards the end of the evening. The Dawn says that without being strikingly new, it was strikingly modern. The best description I can give of it, said Cornelian, is summed up in the comment of the griefin von Toll when she saw it being danced. If they really love each other, I suppose it does not matter. By the way, he added, with apparent indifference,

is there any detailed account of my costume in the Dawn? His companion laughed cynically, as if you hadn't read everything that the Dawn and the other morning papers have to say about the ball hours ago. The naked truth should be avoided in a Turkish bath, said Cornelian, kindly assumed that I've only

had I'm to glance at the weather forecast and the news from China. Oh very well, said the other Your costume isn't described you, Simptin Cameramene, a host of others as mister Cornelian Vaalby resplendent as the Emperor Nero with him miss kate lera typifying insensate vanity. Many hard things have been said of Nero, but his unkindest critics have never accused him of resembling you in feature until some very clear evidence is produced national shoes to believe it. Cornelian was proof

against these shafts. Leaning back gracefully in his chair, he launched forth into that detailed description of his last night's attire which the dawn had so unaccountably failed to supply. I wore a tunic of white Nappalese silk, with a collar of pearls, real pearls. Round my waist. I had a girdle of twisted serpents in beaten gold, studied all over with amethysts. My sandals were of gold laced with scarlet thread, and I had seven bracelets of gold on

each arm. Round my head, I had a wreath of gold and laurel leaves set with scarlet berries, and hanging over my left shoulder as a silk robe of mulberry purple broidered with the signs of the zodiac in golden scarlet. I had it made specially for the occasion. At my side, I had an ivory sheathed dagger with a green jade handle, hung in a green cord

dover leather. At this point in the recital, his companion rose softly, flung his cigarette end into the little water bowl, and passed into the further swelter room. Cornelian Valpy was left still clothed in a look of ineffable complacency, still engaged in all probability in reclothing himself in the finery of the previous evening. End of chapter seventeen. Chapter eighteen of When William Came By Sarkee. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and imentor When William Came By Sarkee, Chapter eighteen, The dead who do not understand The pale light of a November afternoon faded rapidly into the dusk of a November evening. Far over the countryside, housewives put up their cottage shutters, lit their lamps and made the customary a remark that the days

were drawing in. In barnyards and poultry runs, the greediest bullets made a final tour of inspection, picking up the stray remaining morsels of the evening meal, and then, with much scrambling and squawking, sought the places on the

roosting pole that they thought should belong to them. Laborers working in yard and field began to turn their thoughts homeward or tavernwood, as the case might be, And through the cold, squelching slush of a water logged meadow, a weary, bedraggled but unbeaten fox stiffly picked his way, climbed a high bramble grown bank, and flung himself into the sheltering labyrinth of a stretching tangle of

woods. The pack of fierce mouthed things that had rattled him from copse and gorse cover along fallow and plow hedgerow and wooded lane for nigh on an hour, and had pressed hard on his life for the last few minutes, receded suddenly into the background of his experiences, the cold, wet meadow, the thick mask of woods, and the oncoming dusk had stayed the chase, and the fox had outstayed it. In a short time, he would fall mechanically

to licking off some of the mud that caked on his weary pads. In a shorter time, horseman and hounds would have drawn off kennelward and homeward. Yeoville rode through the deepening twilight, relying chiefly on his horse to find its way in the network of hedge bordered lanes that presumably led to a high road or to some human habitation. He was desperately tired after his day's hunting,

a legacy of weakness that the fever had bequeathed to him. But even though he could scarcely sit upright in his saddle, his mind dwelt complacently on the day's sport and looked forward to the snug, cheery comfort that awaited him at

his hunting box. There was a charm, too, even for a tired man, in the eerie stillness of the lone twilight land through which he was passing, a gray, shadow hung land which seemed to have been emptied of all things that belonged to the daytime, and filled with a lurking, moving life of which one knew nothing beyond the sense that it was there, there

and very near. If there had been wood gods and wicked eyed forms in the sunlit groves and hillsides of old hellas, surely there were watchful living things of kindred mold in this dusk hidden wilderness of fields and hedge and coppice. It was Yeovil's third or fourth day with the hounds, without taking into account a couple of mornings cub hunting. Already he felt that he had been doing nothing different from this all his life. His foreign travels, his illness,

his recent weeks in London. They were part of a tapestried background that had very slight and distant connection with his present existence. Of the future, he tried to think with greater energy and determination. For this winter, at any rate, he would hunt and do a little shooting, entertain a few of his neighbors, and make friends with any congenial fellow sportsman who might be within

reach. Next year, things would be different. He would have had time to look around him to regain something of his a four time vigor of mind and body. Next year, when the hunting season was over, he would set about finding out whether there was any nobler game for him to take a hand in. He would enter into correspondence with old friends who had gone out into the tropics and the backwoods. He would do something, so, he told himself. But he knew thoroughly well that he had found his level.

He had ceased to struggle against the fascination of his present surroundings. The slow, quiet comfort and interest of country life appealed with innovating force to the man whom death had half conquered. The pleasures of the chase, well provided for in every detail, and dovetailed in with the assured luxury of a well ordered, Welsh staffed establishment, were exactly what he wanted and exactly what his life

down here afforded him. He was experiencing, too, that passionate, recurring devotion to an old, loved scene that comes at times to men who have traveled far and willingly up and down the world. He was very much at home. The alien standard floating over Buckingham Palace, the Crown of Charlene on public buildings and official documents, the gray ships of war riding in Plymouth Bay and Southampton Water with a flag at their stern, that older generations of Britons

had never looked on. These things seemed far away, and inconsequent amid the hedgerows and woods and fallows of the East Wessex country, horse and poundcraft, harvest, game broods, the planting and felling of timber, the rearing and selling of stock, the letting of grasslands, the care of fisheries, the

upkeep of markets and fairs. They were the things that immediately mattered, And Yeoville saw himself, in moments of disgust and self accusation, settling down into this life of rustic littleness, concerned over the late nesting of a partridge or the defective draining of a loose box, hued busy over affairs that a gardener's boy might grapple with, ignoring the struggle cry that went up, low and bitter and wistful from a dethroned, dispossessed race in whose glories he had gloried,

in whose struggle he leant no hand. In what way, he asked himself in such moments, would his life be better than the life of that parody of manhood who upholsted his rooms with art hangings and rosewood furniture, and babbled over the effect. The lanes seemed interminable and without a more object except to bisect one another. Gates and gaps disclosed nothing in the way of a landmark, and the night began to draw down in increasing shades of darkness.

Presently, however, the tirred horse quickened its pace, swung round a sharp corner into a broader roadway, and stopped with an air of thankful expectancy, at the low doorway of a wayside inn. A cheerful glow of light streamed from windows and door, and a brighter glare came from the other side of the road, where a large motor car was being got ready for an immediate

start. Yovil tumbled stiffly out of his saddle, and in answer to the loud rattle of his hunting crop on the open door, the innkeeper and two or three hangers on hurried out to attend to the wants of man and beast, flower and water for the horse, and something hot for himself or Yovil's

first concern. And then he began to clamor for geographical information. He was rather dismayed to find that the cumulative opinions of those whom he consulted, and of several others who joined unbidden in the discussion, placed his destination at nothing

nearer than nine miles. Nine miles of dark and hilly country road for a tired man on a tired horse assumed enormous far stretching proportions, and although he dimly remembered that he had asked a guest to dinner for that evening, he began to wonder whether the Wayside Inn possessed anything endurable in the way of a bedroom. The landlord interrupted his desperate speculations with a really brilliant effort of suggestion.

There was a gentleman in the bar, he said, who was going in a motor car in the direction for which Yovil was bound, and who would no doubt be willing to drop him at his destination. The gentleman had also been out with the hounds. Yovill's horse could be stabled at the inn and fetched home by groom. Next morning. A hurried embassy to the bar parlor resulted in the news that the motorist would be delighted to be of assistance

to a fellow sportsman. Yeovil gratefully accepted the chance that had so obligingly come his way and hastened to superintend the housing of his horse in its night's quarters. When he had duly seen to the tired animal's comfort and foddering, he returned to the roadway, where a young man in hunting garb and a leveried chauffeur was standing by the side of the waiting car. I am suppleased to be of some use to you, mister Yorville, said the car owner with

a polite bow. And Yovil recognized the young Lieutenant von gabel Route, who had been present at the musical afternoon at Berkshire Street. He had doubtless seen him at the meet that morning, but in his hunting kit he had escaped his observation. I too have been out of Sir Hans, the young man continued, I have left my horse at the crow and sipter in Dolfood. You are living at Black Dean, are you not? I can tissue right

past your door. It is all on my way. Yovil hung back for a moment, overwhelmed with vexation and embarrassment, but it was too late to cancel the arrangement that he had unwittingly entered into, and he was constrained to put himself under obligation to the young officer with the best grace he could muster. After all, he reflected, he had met him under his own roof

as his wife's guest. He paid his reckoning to mine host, tipped the stable lad who had helped him with his horse, and took his place beside von gabel Rot in the car. As they glided along the dark roadway, and the young German reeled off a string of comments on the incidents of the day's sport, Yeovil lay back amid his comfortable wraps and weighed the measure of his humiliation. It was Secily's gospel that one should know what one wanted in

life and take good care that one got what one wanted. Could he apply that test of achievement to his own life? Was this what he really wanted to be doing, pursuing his uneventful way as a country's squire, sharing even his sports and pastimes with men of the nation that had conquered and enslaved his fatherland. The car slackened its pace somewhat as they went through a small hamlet,

past a schoolhouse, past a rural police station. With the new monogram over its notice board, past a church with a little tree grown graveyard. There in a corner, among wild rose bushes and tall ewes lay some of Yovill's own kinsfolk, who had lived in these parts and hunted and life pleasant

in the days that were not so very long ago. Whenever he went past that quiet little gathering place of the dead, Yovil was wont to raise his hat in mute affectionate salutation to those who were now only memories in his family. To night, he somehow omitted the salute and turned his head the other way. It was as though the dead of his race sow and wondered. Three or four months ago, the thing he was doing would have seemed an

impossibility. Now it was actually happening. He was listening to the gay, courteous, tactful shadow of his young companion, laughing now and then at some joking remark, answering some question of interest, learning something of hunting ways and

traditions in von gabel Orte's own country. And when the car turned in at the gate of the hunting lodge and drew up at the steps, the laws of hospitality demanded that Yovil should ask his benefactor of the road to come in for a few minutes and drink something a little better than the wayside in had been been able to supply. The young officer spent the best part of a half hour in Yovill's snuggery, examining and discussing that the trophies of rifle and

collecting gun that covered the walls. He had a good knowledge of woodcraft, and the beasts and birds of Siberian forests and North African deserts were to him new pages in a familiar book. Yovil found himself discoursing eagerly with his chance guest on the European distribution and local variation of such and such a species,

recounting peculiarities in its habits and incidents of its pursuit and capture. If the cold observant eyes of Lady Shalam could have rested on the scene, she would have hailed it as another root fiber thrown out by the Fete a compli. Yovill closed the hall door on his departing visitor and closed his mind on the crowd of angry and accusing thoughts that were waiting to intrude themselves. His valet had already got his bath in readiness, and in a few minutes the tired

huntsman was forgetting weariness and the consciousness of outside things. In the languorous abandonment that steam and hot water induce, brain and limbs seemed to lay themselves down in a contented, waking sleep. The world that was beyond the bathroom walls dropped away into a far unreal distance. Only somewhere through the steam clouds pierced a hasty consciousness that a dinner well chosen was being cooked and would presently be

well served and right well appreciated. That was a lure to drag the bather away from the nirvana land of warmth and steam. The stimulating after effect of the bath took its due effect, and Jovill felt that he was now much less tired and enormously hungry. A cheery fire burned in his dressing room, and a lively black kitten helped him to dress, and incidentally helped him to

require a new tassel to the cord of his dressing gown. As he finished his toilet and the kitten finished its sixth and most notable attack on the tassel, a ring was heard at the front door, and a moment later a loud, hearty and unmistakably hungry voice resounded in the hall. It belonged to the local doctor, who had also taken part in the day's run and had been bidden to enliven the evening meal with the entertainment of his inexhaustible store of

sporting and social reminiscences. He knew the countryside and the country folk inside out, and he was a living, unwritten chronicle of the East Wessex hunt. His conversation seemed exactly the right accompaniment to the meal. His stories brought glimpses of wet hedgerows, stiff plowlands, leafy spines and muddy brooks in among the rich old Worcester and George, and silver at the dinner service, the glow and crattle of the wood fire, the pleasant succession of well cooked dishes and

mellow wines. The world narrowed itself down again to a warm, drowsy scented dining room, with the productive hinterland of kitchen and cellar beyond it, and beyond that an important outer world of loose box and harness room and stable yard. Further again, a dark, hush region where pheasants roosted and owls flitted, and foxes prowled, Yeovil sat and listened to story after story of the men and women and horses of the neighborhood. Even the foxes seemed to have

a personality, some of them, and a personal history. It was a little like Hans Andersen, he decided, and a little like the reminiscences of an Irish r m, and perhaps just a little like some of the more probable adventures of Baron Munchhausen. The newer stories were evidently true to the smallest detail. The earlier ones had altered somewhat in repetition. As plants and animals vary under domestication, and all the time, there was one topic that was

never touched on. Of half the families mentioned, it was necessary to add the qualifying information that they used to live at such and such a place. The countryside knew them no longer their properties were for sale or had already passed into the hands of strangers. But neither man cared to allude to the grinning shadow that sat at the feast and sent an icy chill now and again through the cheeriest jest and most jovial story. The brisk run with the hounds that

day had stirred and warmed their pulses. It was an evening for comfortable forgetting. Later that night, in the stillness of his bedroom, with the dwindling noises of a retiring household dropping off one by one into ordered silence, a door shutting here, a fire being raked out there, the thoughts that had been held away came crowding in. The body was tired, but the brain

was not, and Yeovil lay awake with his thoughts for company. The world grew suddenly wide again, filled with the significance of things that mattered, held by the actions of men that mattered. Hunting box and stable and gun room dwindled to a mere pinpoint in the universe. There were other, larger,

more absorbing things on which the mine dwelt. There was the gray, cold sea outside Dover and Portsmouth and Cork, where the great gray ships of war rocked and swung with the tides, where the sailors sang in doggerel English, that bitter sounding adaptation Germania rules to waves, where the flag of a world power floated for the world to see, And in oven like cities of India.

There were men who looked out at the white sun glare, the heat baked dust, the welter of crowded streets, who listened to the unceasing chorus of harsh throated crows, the strident creaking of cart wheels, the buzz and drone of insect swarms, and the rattle call of the tree lizards. Men whose thoughts went hungrily to the cool, gray skies and wet turf and moist

lowlands of an English hunting country. Men whose memories listened yearningly to the music of a deep throated hound and the call of a game bird in the stubble. Yovil had secured for himself the enjoyment of the things for which these men hungered. He had known what he wanted in life slowly and with hesitation, yet nevertheless, surely he had arrived at the achievement of his unconfessed desires.

Here, installed under his own roof tree, with as good horse flesh in his stable as man could desire, with sport lying almost at his door, with his wife ready to come down and help him entertain his neighbors, mari Jovil had found the life that he wanted and was accursed in his own eyes. He argued with himself, and palliated and explained, but he knew why he had turned his eyes away that evening from the little graveyard under the trees.

One cannot plain things to the dead end of chapter eighteen. Chapter nineteen of When William Came by Sake. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please go to LibriVox dot org. Reading by and Iminta, When William Came by Saki, Chapter nineteen, The little Foxes take us the foxes, the little

foxes that spoil the vines. On a warm and sunny May afternoon, some ten months since Yeoville's return from his Siberian wanderings and sickness, Cicily sat at a small table in the open air restaurant in Hyde Park, finishing her after luncheon coffee and listening to the meritorious performance of the orchestra. Opposite her sat Larry meadow Field, absorbed for the moment in the slow enjoyment of a cigarette,

which also was not without its short lived merits. Larry was a well dressed youngster who was, in Secily's opinion, distinctly good to look on, an opinion which the boy himself obviously shared. He had the healthy, well cared appearance of a country dweller who has turned into a town dandy without suffering in the process. His blue black hair, growing very low down on a broad forehead, was brushed back in the smoothness that gave his head the appearance

of a rain polished sloe. His eyebrows were two dark smudges, and his large, violet gray eyes expressed the RESTful, good temper of an animal whose immediate requirements have been satisfied. The lunch had been an excellent one, and it was jolly to feed out of doors in the warm spring air, the only drawback to the arrangement being the absence of mirrors. However, if he could not look at himself, a great many people could look at him.

Cicily listened to the orchestra as it jerked and strutted through a fantastic dance measure, and as she listened, she looked appreciatively at the boy on the other side of the table, whose soul for the moment seemed to be in his cigarette. Her scheme of life, knowing just what you wanted and taking good

care that you got it was justifying itself by results. Ronnie, grown tarsome with success, had not been difficult to replace, and no one in her world had the satisfaction of being able to condole with her on the undesirable experience of a long interregnum to feminine acquaintances with fewer advantages of purse and brains and looks. She might figure as that Yeoville woman, but never had she given

them the justification to allude to her as poor Sicily Yeoville. And Murray dear old soul had cooled down, as she had hoped and wished, from his white heat of disgust at the things that she had preferred herself to accept philosophically, a new chapter of their married life, and man and woman friendship had opened. Many a rare gallop they had had together that winter, many a

cheery dinner gathering and long bridge evening in the cozy hunting lodge. Though he still hated the new London and held himself aloof from most of her town set, yet he had not shown himself rigidly intolerant of the sprinkling of Teuton sportsmen who hunted and shot down in his part of the country. The orchestra finished its clicking and caracoling, and was accorded a short clatter of applause. The dance macabre, said Cecily to her companion. One of Saint Saanz's best known

pieces is it, said Larry indifferently. Now take your word for it. Fraid I don't know much about music, you dear boy. That's just what I like in you, said Cecily. You're such a delicious young barbarian, am I said Larry? I dare say? I suppose you know? Larry's father had been a brilliantly clever man who had married a brilliantly handsome woman. The fates had not the least intention that Larry should take after both parents.

The fashion of having one Blanche in the open air has quite caught on this season, said Cecily. One sees everybody here on a fine day. There's Lady Bailquist over there. She used to be Lady Shalam, you know, before her husband got the earldom. To be more correct, before she got it for him. I suppose she's all god to see the great review. It was, in fact precisely the absorbing topic of the Fourthoming Boy Scout March

past that was engaging the Countess of Bailquist's earnest attention at the moment. It's going to be an historical occasion, she was saying to Sir Leonard Pitherby, whose services to literature had up to the present received a half measure of recognition. If it miscarries, it will be a serious setback for the fitter compli. If it is a success, it will be the biggest step forward in

the path of reconciliation between the two races that has yet been taken. It will mean that the younger generation is on our side, not all, of course, but some. That is all we can expect at present, and that will be enough to work on. Supposing the Scouts hang back and don't turn up in the numbers, said Sir Leonard anxiously, That, of course is the danger, said Lady Belfist quietly. Probably two thirds of the available strength will hold back, but a third or even a sixth would be enough.

It would redeem the parade from the calamity of fiasco, and it would be a nucleus to work on for the future. That is what we want a good start, a preliminary rally. It is the first step that counts. That is why today's event is of much importance. Of course, of course, the first step on the road, assented Sir Leonard, I can assure you, continued Lady Belgfist, that nothing has been left undone to rally the Scouts to the new order of things. Special privileges have been showered on

them alone among all the Cannet corps. They have been allowed to retain their organization. A decoration of merit has been instituted for them. A large hostelry and gymnasium has been provided for them in Westminster. His Majesty's youngest son is to be their Scout Master in chief. A great athletic meeting is to be held for them each year, with valuable prizes. Three or four hundred of them are to be taken every summer free of charge, for a holiday in

the Bavarian Highlands and the Baltic seaboard. Besides this, the parent of every Scout who obtains the Medal for Efficiency is to be exempted from part of the new war taxation that the people are finding so burdensome. The one certainly cannot say that they have not had attractions held out to them, said sir Leonard. It is a special effort, said Lady Belfist. It is worth making

an effort. Four. They are going to be the janisseries of the Empire, the younger generation, knocking at the doors of progress and thrusting the bars and bolts of old racial prejudices. I tell you, Sir Leonard, it will be an historic moment when the first core of those little CARKI glad boys swings through the gates of the park. When do they come, asked the

baronet, catching something of his companion's zeal. The first detachment is due to arrive at three, said Lady Belchfist, referring to a small timetable of the afternoon's proceedings three punctually, and the others will follow in rapid succession. The Emperor and Suite will arrive at two fifty and take up their positions at the

saluting base over there, where the big flagstaff has been set up. The boys will come in by Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch and the Albert Gate according to their districts, and form in one big column over there where the little flags are pegged out, then the young Prince will inspect them and lead them past His majesty. Who will be with the imperial party, asked Sir

Leonard. Oh, it is to be an important occasion. Everything will be done to emphasize the significance of the occasion, said Lady belcrist again, consulting her program. The King of Wurtemburg and two of the Bavarian royal princes, an Abyssinian envoy who is over here. He will lend a touch of picturesque barbarism to the scene. The General commanding the London District, and a whole lot of other military big wigs, and the Austrian, Italian and Romanian military

attaches. She reeled off the posing list of notables with an air of quiet satisfaction. Sir Leonard made mental notes of personages to whom he might send presentation copies of his new work, Frederick William the Great Elector a popular biography as a souvenir of today's or suspicious event. It's nearlier quarter to three now, he said, let us get a good position before the crowd gets thicker. Come along to my car. It is just opposite to the saluting base,

said her ladyship. I have a police passed that will let us through. We'll ask missus Yeovil and her young friend to join us. Larry excused himself from joining the party. He had a barbarian's reluctance to assisting at an imperial triumph. I think I'll push off to the swimming bath, he said to Cecily. See you again about tea time. Cecily walked with Lady beaulkfast and a literary baronet towards the crowd of spectators, which will steadily growing in dimensions.

The newsboy ran in front of them, displaying a poster with the intelligence Essex's wickets fall rapidly. A semblance of county crickets still survived under the new order of things. Near the saluting base, some thirty or forty motor cars were drawn up in line, and Cecily and her companions exchanged greetings with many of the occupants. A lovely deaf or review, isn't it, said the Gryfin von Tolb, breaking off her conversation with the hair Rybinoc, the little

Pomeranium banker, who was sitting by her side. They haven't you brought mister Meadowfield, such a nice by. I wanted him to come and sit in my carriage and talk to me. He doesn't talk, you know, said Cecily. He's only brilliant to look at. Well, I could have looked at him, said the Gryfinn. There'll be thousands of other boys to look at presently, said Cecily, laughing at the old woman's frankness. Oh do you think so, it'd be thousands, asked the Greffin, with an anxious

lowering of the voice. Really, thousands, hundreds perhaps, though it's some uncertainty. Everyone is not saving hundreds anyway, said Sicily. The Gryffin turned to the little banker and spoke to him rapidly and earnestly in German. It is most important that we should consolidate our position in this country. We must coax the younger generation over by degrees. We must disarm their hostility. We cannot afford to be always on the watch in this quarter. It is our

sort of weakness, and we cannot afford to be weak. This slave upheaval in southeastern Europe is to becoming a serious menace. Have you seen today's telegrams from my gram they are bad reading. There is no computing the extent of this movement. It is directed against us, said the banker. Agreed, said the gryffin. It is in the nature of things that it must be

against us. Let us have no illusions. Within the next ten years sooner, perhaps we shall be faced with a crisis which will be only a beginning. We shall need all our strength. That is why we cannot afford to be weak over here. To day is an important day, I confess I am anxious. Hark the kettle drums, exclaimed the commanding voice of Lady Bailcrist. His Majesty is coming, quick, bundle into the car. The crowd

behind the police kept lines surged expectantly into closer formation. Spectators hurried up from sidewalks and stood craning their necks above the shoulders of earlier arrivals. Through the archway at Hyde Park Corner came a resplendid cavalcade with a swirl of color and

rhythmic movement, and a crash of exultant music. Lifeguards with gleaming helmets, a detachment of Wurtemburg lancers with a flutter of black and yellow pennons, a rich medley of staff uniforms, a prancing array of princely horsemen, the perial standard, and the King of Prussia, Great Britain and Ireland, Emperor of the West. It was the most imposing display that Londoners had seen since the catastrophe. Slowly, grandly, with thunder of music and beat of hoofs,

the procession passed through the crowd across the sward towards the saluting base. Slowly the eagle standard, charged with the leopards, lion and harp of the conquered kingdoms rose, massed high on the flagstaff and fluttered in the breeze. Slowly and with military precision, the troops and suite took up their position round the central figure of the great pageant. Trumpets and kettle drums suddenly ceased their music, and in a moment there rose in their stead an eager buzz of comment

from the nearest spectators. How well the young prince looks in his scout uniform. The King of Wuchnemburg is much younger man than I thought he was. Is that a Prussian or Bavarian uniform? There on the right, the man on the back horse neither it's Austrian, the Austrian military attache. It is one stop or talking to his majesty. He organized the boy scouts in Germany. You know his Majesty's looking very pleased. He has reason to be pleased.

This is a great event in the history of the two countries. It marks a new epoch. Oh do you see the Abyssinian envoy. What a picturesque figure he makes, How well he sits his horse. That is the Grand Duke of Bardon's nephew talking to the King of Wurtemburg. Now on the bosom, chatter of the spectators fell. Suddenly three sound strokes, distant,

measured sinister, the clang of a clock striking three three o'clock. And not a boy scout within sight or hearing, exclaimed the loud ringing voice of Joan Mardle. One can usually hear their drums and trumpets a couple of miles away. There's the traffic to get through, said Sir Leonard Pitherby in an equally high pitched voice. And of course, he added vaguely, it takes some time to get the various units together. One must give them a few minutes.

Grease, Lady Belfist, said nothing but her RESTful, watchful eyes were turned first to Hyde Park Corner, and then in the direction of the marble larch, back again to Hyde Park Corner. Only the dark lines of the waiting crowd met her view, with the yellow newspaper placards fitting in and out, announcing to an indifferent public the fate of Essex's wickets. As far as her searching eyes could travel, the green stretch of tree and sward remained unbroken

save by casual loiterers. No small brown columns appeared, No drum beat came throbbing up from the distance. The little flags pegged out to mark the positions of the awaited scout cause fluttered in meaningless isolation on the empty parade ground. His Majesty was talking unconcernedly with one of his officers. The foreign attaches looked steadily between their charges, as though nothing in particular was hanging in the balance.

The Abyssinian envoy displayed an untroubled serenity, which was probably genuine. Elsewhere among the suite was a perceptible fidget, the more obvious because it was elaborately cloaked. Among the privileged onlookers drawn up near the saluting point, the fidgeting was more unrestrained. Six minutes passed three and not a sign of them, exclaimed Joan Mardle, with the explosive articulation of one who cannot any longer hold back a truth hark, said some one. I hear trumpets. There was

an instant concentration of listening, a straining of eyes. It was only the tute of a passing motor car. Even Sir Leonard Pitherby, with the eye of faith, could not locate so as much as a cloud of dust on the park horizon. And now another sound was heard, a sound difficult to define without beginning without dimension, the growing murmur of a crowd waking to a slowly dawning sensation. Ever is the bend would strike up an air, said

the Griffin von Tol fretfully. It is stupid waiting here in silence. Joan fingered her watch, but she made no further remark. She realized that no amount of malicious comment could be so dramatically effective. Now, as the slow slipping away of the intolerable seconds, the murmur from the crowd grew in volume. Some satirical wits started whistling in imitation of an advancing fife and drum band.

Others took it up. When the air resounded with the shrill music of a phantom army on the march, the mock throbbing of drum and squealing of fife rose and fell above the packed masses of spectators, But no answering echo came from beyond the distant trees. Like mushrooms in the night, A muster of uniform police and plainclothes detectives sprang into evidence on all sides. Whatever happened,

there must be no disloyal demonstration. The whistlers and mockers were pointedly invited to keep silence, and one or two addresses were taken under the trees. Well at the back of the crowd, a young man stood watching the long stretch of road along which the scouts should come. Something had drawn him there against his will, to witness the imperial triumph, to watch the writing of yet another chapter in the history of his country's submission to an accepted fact.

And now a dull flush crept into his gray face, a look that was partly new born hope and resurrected pride, partly remorse and shame burned in his eyes shame, the choking, searing shame of self reproach that cannot be reasoned away, was dominant in his heart. He had laid down his arms.

There were others who had never hoisted the flag of surrender. He had given up the fight and joined the ranks of the hopelessly subservient in thousands of English homes throughout the lad And there were young hearts that had not forgotten, and knock compounded, would not yield. The younger generation had barred the door, and in the pleasant May sunshine, the eagle standard floated and flapped, The black and yellow pennons shifted restlessly. Emperor and princes, generals and guards sat

stiffly in their saddles, and waited and waited. End of Chapter nineteen and of when William came by, sake red by and imentor