But of course his lordship did know that, in the Kaiser’s view, “the twentieth century belonged to Germany,” and that his Majesty also considered Britannia had ruled the waves too long. Wherefore, Hoch! and again, Hoch! for the rights of the Vaterland. How glorious an achievement--as foretold by the German romance-writer--to drive the British Squadrons from the North Sea; to disembark without difficulty sixty thousand German warriors at Leith; to march southward, while accommodating French allies landed another army at Hastings and closed in on London; to dictate terms of peace at Hampton Court; and then to enter London with all the pomp and circumstance of war--imperial victor--not merely William the Second, but William the Second Conqueror of England. Hoch! and again, Hoch! and Hoch! once more. A dream? the baseless fabric of a vision? Probably; but the German navy was a stern reality; they were very busy over there at Kiel, Heligoland, and elsewhere, and realities must be reckoned with. The shipwrights’ hammers resounded persistently in the German dockyards, and the clangour crossed the sea. So Lord Downland had a good deal to think of in Berkeley Square, as well as at the Foreign Office; though, even so, he little dreamed of what the Royal Petrel would be about before the year was out. CHAPTER XVI THE MANIA THAT LAID HOLD OF LONDON When London became fully alive to the weird occurrences in its midst, the first feeling was one of contempt, but it was quickly followed by the dawn of consternation. An article in the _Lancet_, widely quoted by the lay newspapers, dealt gravely with the problems that the revival of the Dancing Mania presented. It foreshadowed possible developments in terms which led husbands to look at their wives, and fathers at their daughters, with an uneasy feeling that they, too, might become victims of what the _Lancet_ described in technical terms as chorea, and in popular language, as a form of St Vitus’s dance. Like lawyers searching for precedents, the press-men of the day delved diligently for the history of the Dancing Plague. The best contribution on the subject was contained in an anonymous article which appeared in the _Fortnightly Review_. The writer pointed out that these convulsionary manifestations were more or less prevalent during a period of quite two hundred years, dating from the end of the fourteenth century, and that, human nature being the same in all ages, there was nothing inconceivable, or even improbable, in a revival of such distressing symptoms in modern times. The difference would be in treatment rather than in the disorder itself. In former times chorea was regarded as curable only by those--the priests--who had the cure of souls. People who were hurried body and soul into the magic circle of hellish superstition needed to be rescued by supernatural agencies. The screaming, foaming men and women who in the Middle Ages swept with wild