than ever before.  Men and women break down and fall out of working ranks continuously.  The number of men in the government who have disappeared from public view is amazing, the number that would like to disappear is still greater—­from sheer overstrain.  The Prime Minister is tired.  Bonar Law in a long conference that Crosby and I had with him yesterday wearily ran all round a circle rather than hit a plain proposition with a clear decision.  Mr. Balfour has kept his house from overwork a few days every recent week.  I lunched with Mr. Asquith yesterday; even he seemed jaded; and Mrs. Asquith assured me that “everything is going to the devil damned fast.”  Some conspicuous men who have always been sober have taken to drink.  The very few public dinners that are held are served with ostentatious meagreness to escape criticism.  I attended one last week at which there was no bread, no butter, no sugar served.  All of which doesn’t mean that the world here is going to the bad—­only that it moves backward and forward by emotions; and this is normally a most unemotional race.  Overwork and the loss of Sons and friends—­the list of the lost grows—­always make an abnormal strain.  The churches are fuller than ever before.  So, too, are the “parlours” of the fortune-tellers.  So also the theatres—­in the effort to forget one’s self.  There are afternoon dances for young officers at home on leave:  the curtains are drawn and the music is muffled.  More marriages take place—­blind and maimed, as well as the young fellows just going to France—­than were ever celebrated in any year within men’s memory.  Verse-writing is rampant.  I have received enough odes and sonnets celebrating the Great Republic and the Great President to fill a folio volume.  Several American Y.M.C.A. workers lately turned rampant Pacifists and had to be sent home.  Colonial soldiers and now and then an American sailor turn up at our Y.M.C.A. huts as full as a goat and swear after the event that they never did such a thing before.  Emotions and strain everywhere!

     Affectionately,

     W.H.P.

In March Page, a very weary man—­as these letters indicate—­took a brief holiday at St. Ives, on the coast of Cornwall.  As he gazed out on the Atlantic, the yearning for home, for the sandhills and the pine trees of North Carolina, again took possession of his soul.  Yet it is evident, from a miscellaneous group of letters written at this time, that his mind revelled in a variety of subjects, ranging all the way from British food and vegetables to the settlement of the war and from secret diplomacy to literary style.

     To Mrs. Charles G. Loring
     St. Ives, Cornwall, March 3, 1918.

     DEAR KITTY: