and he added:  “There is a bundle of correspondence that will appeal to you personally.  Those are letters written by your father to an intimate friend in whose papers they were found.  They contain many references to yourself, though you couldn’t have been more than four years old at the time.  Your father seems to have been extremely interested in his son.”  That afternoon I went to the University, taking with me my eldest son.  The attention of that young Englishman was mainly attracted by some relics of Copernicus in a glass case.  I saw the bundle of letters and accepted the kind proposal of the librarian that he should have them copied for me during the holidays.  In the range of the deserted vaulted rooms lined with books, full of august memories, and in the passionless silence of all this enshrined wisdom, we walked here and there talking of the past, the great historical past in which lived the inextinguishable spark of national life; and all around us the centuries-old buildings lay still and empty, composing themselves to rest after a year of work on the minds of another generation.

No echo of the German ultimatum to Russia penetrated that academical peace.  But the news had come.  When we stepped into the street out of the deserted main quadrangle, we three, I imagine, were the only people in the town who did not know of it.  My boy and I parted from the librarian (who hurried home to pack up for his holiday) and walked on to the hotel, where we found my wife actually in the car waiting for us to take a run of some ten miles to the country house of an old school-friend of mine.  He had been my greatest chum.  In my wanderings about the world I had heard that his later career both at school and at the University had been of extraordinary brilliance—­in classics, I believe.  But in this, the iron-grey moustache period of his life, he informed me with badly concealed pride that he had gained world fame as the Inventor—­no, Inventor is not the word—­Producer, I believe would be the right term—­of a wonderful kind of beetroot seed.  The beet grown from this seed contained more sugar to the square inch—­or was it to the square root?—­than any other kind of beet.  He exported this seed, not only with profit (and even to the United States), but with a certain amount of glory which seemed to have gone slightly to his head.  There is a fundamental strain of agriculturalist in a Pole which no amount of brilliance, even classical, can destroy.  While we were having tea outside, looking down the lovely slope of the gardens at the view of the city in the distance, the possibilities of the war faded from our minds.  Suddenly my friend’s wife came to us with a telegram in her hand and said calmly:  “General mobilisation, do you know?” We looked at her like men aroused from a dream.  “Yes,” she insisted, “they are already taking the horses out of the ploughs and carts.”  I said:  “We had better go back to town as quick as we can,” and my friend assented with a troubled look:  “Yes, you had better.”  As we passed through villages on our way back we saw mobs of horses assembled on the commons with soldiers guarding them, and groups of villagers looking on silently at the officers with their note-books checking deliveries and writing out receipts.  Some old peasant women were already weeping aloud.