would have riled Job.  One had got to batten down the recollection of our fellows out there who were sweating blood to keep these fools snug.  Yet I found it impossible to be angry with them for long, they were so babyishly innocent.  Indeed, I couldn’t help liking them, and finding a sort of quality in them.  I had spent three years among soldiers, and the British regular, great follow that he is, has his faults.  His discipline makes him in a funk of red-tape and any kind of superior authority.  Now these people were quite honest and in a perverted way courageous.  Letchford was, at any rate.  I could no more have done what he did and got hunted off platforms by the crowd and hooted at by women in the streets than I could have written his leading articles.

All the same I was rather low about my job.  Barring the episode of the ransacking of my effects the first night, I had not a suspicion of a clue or a hint of any mystery.  The place and the people were as open and bright as a Y.M.C.A. hut.  But one day I got a solid wad of comfort.  In a corner of Letchford’s paper, the Critic, I found a letter which was one of the steepest pieces of invective I had ever met with.  The writer gave tongue like a beagle pup about the prostitution, as he called it, of American republicanism to the vices of European aristocracies.  He declared that Senator La Follette was a much-misunderstood patriot, seeing that he alone spoke for the toiling millions who had no other friend.  He was mad with President Wilson, and he prophesied a great awakening when Uncle Sam got up against John Bull in Europe and found out the kind of standpatter he was.  The letter was signed ‘John S. Blenkiron’ and dated ‘London, 3 July’.

The thought that Blenkiron was in England put a new complexion on my business.  I reckoned I would see him soon, for he wasn’t the man to stand still in his tracks.  He had taken up the role he had played before he left in December 1915, and very right too, for not more than half a dozen people knew of the Erzerum affair, and to the British public he was only the man who had been fired out of the Savoy for talking treason.  I had felt a bit lonely before, but now somewhere within the four corners of the island the best companion God ever made was writing nonsense with his tongue in his old cheek.

There was an institution in Biggleswick which deserves mention.  On the south of the common, near the station, stood a red-brick building called the Moot Hall, which was a kind of church for the very undevout population.  Undevout in the ordinary sense, I mean, for I had already counted twenty-seven varieties of religious conviction, including three Buddhists, a Celestial Hierarch, five Latter-day Saints, and about ten varieties of Mystic whose names I could never remember.  The hall had been the gift of the publisher I have spoken of, and twice a week it was used for lectures and debates.  The place was managed by a committee and was surprisingly popular, for it gave all the bubbling intellects a chance of airing their views.  When you asked where somebody was and were told he was ‘at Moot,’ the answer was spoken in the respectful tone in which you would mention a sacrament.