During these difficult and dangerous years Mrs. Flad kept a diary, which was published, but which is now out of print. With the coming of Lord Napier the prisoners were released, and King Theodore came to a tragic end by his own hand. The pastor is hopeful of some day taking up his father’s work and he passed round a book printed in Geëz, I take it, a page of which he reads every day. His father used to tell him how in the native cafés he had heard discussion as to whether the Queen of Sheba who visited King Solomon was ruler of Abyssinia or Arabia. One need not be in Abyssinia to be chained to a black mood at least, if not a black man. Sitting in the court at Carlsruhe, watching the barbed wire shake and shiver like a man in an ague to the play of my foot, I have been seized with a sudden fear of the horrors from which I have emerged. This fear in retrospect, so to speak, was greater far than anything I can confess to have felt in actuality; as if one who had boldly and blindly crossed a profound abyss on a tight-rope should faint or falter, grow dizzy and fall, having reached firm ground once more; as if one had all the past still to pass through, and it were not possible that one should safely pass through it. To me, on such an occasion, appeared my buoyant young Italian friend Cotta, who, passing an arm through mine, haled me off for a glass of the atrocious white wine of the country--or at least of the _Kantine_. Thereafter we walked together in the Close, Cotta giving his English an airing. “Yes, I speak English very well, very well. Have you see the donkey?” The little donkey, which, yoked to a little waggon, brings us on most days a load of parcels, and which has become so friendly to an alien officer that even in charge of a somewhat obdurate driver it will make a sudden detour from its course in order to shove its muzzle into my hand, was grazing in the circular grass plot in the centre of the square. “It is the better German in the camp!” says Cotta. “Ah, I am very sad, very sad,” he proceeds. “I have no letter from my girl, and the Germans have take from me her photograph. Damn! damn!” [Illustration: AN ITALIAN MAJOR OF MOUNTAIN ARTILLERY.] * * * * * [Illustration: PLAYBILL FOR LADY GREGORY’S “THE RISING OF THE MOON”] * * * * * [Illustration: OUR ORCHESTRA.] IV ENTERTAINMENT IN EXILE