The funny part of the Hindenburg cult--I suppose it should be written “Kult”--was that there was no one to tell the Germans that they were doing the work of necromancy in hammering those nails into his wooden head. Everybody knows that the only really effective way of finishing off an enemy is to make a wooden effigy of him and hammer nails into it (every sensible person knows that as the nails are hammered home the original comes to grief). The feminine equivalent of this robust operation is equally effective, though the necromancers only recommended it for the use of schools. The effigy is made of wax, and you place it before a cheerful fire and stick pins into it. It has the advantage of being handy and economical, for there are few households that cannot produce an old doll of wax which would otherwise be thrown away and wasted. But the Germans pride themselves on having got rid of their superstition, and when people have got rid of their superstition they have got rid of their sense of humour. If they had not been so hasty in naming their invincible lines after Wagner's, operas they would surely have remembered that with the _Siegfried_, the _Parsifal_, and the rest there was bound to be included _Der Fliegende Hollander_, the pet name of the German Cavalry: they were the first to fly when the operatic line was broken; and then--_Gôtterdàmmerung Hellroter!_ And why were the Bolsheviks so foolish as to forget that the Czar was “Nicky” to their paymaster, William, and that that name is the Greek for “Victory”? Having destroyed Nicky, how could they look for anything but disaster? The connection of these jottings with our gardens may not be apparent to every one who reads them. But though the sense of liberty is so great in our Garden of Peace that I do not hold myself bound down to any of the convenances of composition, and though I cultivate rather than uproot even the most flagrant forms of digression in this garden, yet it so happens that when I begin to write of the most distinguished of the gardens of Yardley Parva, I cannot avoid recalling that lovely Saturday when we were seated among its glorious roses, eating peaches that had just been plucked from the wall. We were a large and chatty company, and among the party that were playing clock golf on a part of a lovely lawn of the purest emerald, there did not seem to be one who had read the menace of the morning papers. Our host was a soldier, and his charming wife was the daughter of a distinguished Admiral. At the other side of the table where the dish of peaches stood there was another naval officer, and while we were swapping stories of the Cape, the butler was pointing us out to a telegraph messenger who had come through the French window. The boy made his way to us, taking the envelope from his belt. He looked from one of us to the other, saying the name of my _vis-a-vis_--“Commander A--------?”