no longer in their eyes the interesting respect-commanding personality that he had been in past days.  I went to my own room, where the samovar was bubbling its familiar tune and a smiling red-shirted Russian boy was helping my Buriat 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 sheets, odd pieces of the Novoe Vremya, the Moskovskie Viedomosti, one or two complete numbers of local papers published at Perm and Tobolsk.  I do not 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 crowded hours in a corner of North-Western Europe.  I searched frantically for telegrams of later dates that would put a better complexion on the matter, that would retrieve something from the ruin; presently I came across a page of the illustrated supplement that the Novoe Vremya publishes once a week.  There was a photograph of a long-fronted building with a flag flying over it, labelled ’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 Nemetskie Tsar.  I have a vivid recollection of that plainly-furnished little room, with the inevitable gilt ikon in one corner, and the samovar hissing and gurgling on the table, and the thrumming music of a balalaika orchestra coming up from the restaurant below; the next coherent 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, Holham, I have been encouraged to keep my mind as much off the war and public affairs as possible, and I have 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 am more or less a live man again, and I want to fill 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, “with a wholly unimportant disagreement about some frontier business in East Africa; there was a slight attack of nerves in the stock markets, and then the whole thing seemed in a fair way towards being settled.  Then the negotiations over the affair began to drag unduly, and there was a further flutter 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