The noise made by those bombs is unmistakable, unforgetable, and quite distinct from the chorus of the guns and shrapnel—­a crashing note, reverberating, sustained, like the E minor of some giant calliope.

In face of the raids, which coincide with the coming of the moon, London is calm, but naturally indignant over such methods of warfare.  The damage done is ridiculously small; the percentage of deaths and injuries insignificant.  There exists, in every large city, a riffraff to get panicky:  these are mostly foreigners; they seek the Tubes, and some the crypt of St. Paul’s, for it is wise to get under shelter during the brief period of the raids, and most citizens obey the warnings of the police.  It is odd, indeed, that more people are not hurt by shrapnel.  The Friday following the raid I have described I went out of town for a week-end, and returned on Tuesday to be informed that a shell had gone through the roof outside of the room I had vacated, and the ceiling and floor of the bedroom of one of the officers who lived below.  He was covered with dust and debris, his lights went out, but he calmly stepped through the window.  “You’d best have your dinner early, sir,” I was told by the waiter on my return.  “Last night a lady had her soup up-stairs, her chicken in the office, and her coffee in the cellar.”  It is worth while noting that she had all three.  Another evening, when I was dining with Sir James Barrie, he showed me a handful of shrapnel fragments.  “I gathered them off the roof,” he informed me.  And a lady next to whom I sat at luncheon told me in a matter-of-fact tone that a bomb had fallen the night before in the garden of her town house.  “It was quite disagreeable,” she said, “and broke all our windows on that side.”  During the last raids before the moon disappeared, by a new and ingenious system of barrage fire the Germans were driven off.  The question of the ethics of reprisals is agitating London.

One “raid,” which occurred at midday, is worth recording.  I was on my way to our Embassy when, in the residential quarter through which I passed, I found all the housemaids in the areas gazing up at the sky, and I was told by a man in a grocer’s cart that the Huns had come again.  But the invader on this occasion turned out to be a British aviator from one of the camps who was bringing a message to London.  The warmth of his reception was all that could be desired, and he alighted hastily in the first open space that presented itself.

Looking back to the time when I left America, I can recall the expectation of finding a Britain beginning to show signs of distress.  I was prepared to live on a small ration.  And the impression of the scarcity of food was seemingly confirmed when the table was being set for the first meal at my hotel; when the waiter, who chanced to be an old friend, pointed to a little bowl half-full of sugar and exclaimed:  “I ought to warn you, sir, it’s all you’re