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 damsel drifted up to Yeovil 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 the pot of China tea he had asked for, Yeovil would hardly have been surprised.  However, the tea duly arrived on the table, and the pale damsel scribbled a figure on a slip of paper, put it silently by the side of the teapot, and drifted silently away.  Yeovil had seen the same sort of thing done on the musical-comedy stage, and done rather differently.

“Can you tell me, sir, is the Imperial announcement out yet?” asked the young clergyman, after a brief scrutiny of his neighbour.

“No, I have been waiting about for the last half-hour on the look-out for it,” said Yeovil; “the special editions ought to be out by now.”  Then he added:  “I have only just lately come from abroad.  I know scarcely anything of London 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 have seen something of what one may call the upper, or, at any rate, 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 blame the politicians, they blame the leisured classes; in an indirect way I believe they blame the Church.  Certainly, the 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 Londoner ever admits that 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 school discipline was ever a thing repugnant to the schoolboard child and its parents; no schoolboard 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 Bert’ and ‘our Sid’ were of those for whom there is no condemnation; if they were punished it was for faults that ‘no, they never’ committed.  Naturally the grown-up generation of Berts and Sids, the voters and householders, do not realise, still less admit, that it was they who called the tune to which the politicians danced.  They had to choose