The passers-by, seeing these perilous displays of agility, paused with horror, and then produced a coin. One day, outside a mansion on the east side of Berkeley Square, a thin pale-faced gentleman, with a worried look, stared aghast for a moment while the unconscious Billy was rehearsing. And when the worried man passed into the house, the young acrobat found a shilling, actually a silver shilling, in his hand. He asked who the gentleman was, and Joe informed him that he was none other than the most noble the Marquis of Downland. No wonder he was worried; for, apart from the domestic agitation of the capital, the pulse of other capitals had to be felt through the medium of the wires in Downland House. All the inner workings of the Chancelleries of Europe were known within those walls; all the devious devices of diplomacy; all the international collisions avoided by a hair’s breadth; all the movements of foreign fleets; all the ambitions of foreign potentates and the disposal of continental armies. For the Marquis was Minister for Foreign Affairs, and they gave him sleepless nights. To Downland House came ambassadors and envoys at critical junctures in the lives of States. They came after the great naval battle of the Dogger Bank, in which a powerful fleet of trawlers, armed with fishing nets, was utterly routed by a Russian Squadron; they came again, but less conspicuously, when a German Squadron paid a surprise visit to Tangier. And there were many conferences there when certain Powers proposed to close the Baltic Sea to British men-of-war. When the Foreign Secretary suffered from nightmare, it generally took the form of a thing with wings. It was a creature which sought to imitate the Apostle Peter by walking on the sea--a web-footed, oceanic bird, with a rudimentary hinder toe, and the upper mandible very strongly hooked. This restless bird liked to visit every sea, skimming the surface and gobbling the small fishes, crustaceans, molluscs, and the rest of them. It always came in view in stormy weather. When the Foreign Secretary awoke from these bad dreams, he never felt quite sure whether the bird were a gigantic stormy petrel or the German Emperor.