This evening I went to see an electro-technician, whom I know. We went for a walk on the islands. The technician’s brother, who had been a sailor, was with us. The electro-technician had been in Belgium and London. Then we went to the “Norodniu Dom,” the “People’s Palace,” a place where there is a popular theatre, a garden, and a restaurant. Before we went in here, the technician’s brother said he must have some vodka. So we went into a wine shop and he drank a large tumbler of vodka straight off. “This is the eighth glass I have had to-day,” he said. “It is only habit. I don’t feel any effects from it; but if I were to drink a glass of wine now I should be drunk.” We went into the “People’s Palace” and sat in the garden. Some other friends joined us. We ordered beer, and the technician’s brother was unwise enough to drink some. The technician described life in Paris and London. Paris he detested. He spoke French rather well. He said it was a boring city. I said, “Don’t you like the French theatres? You must admit they act well.” He said: “Their plays are so totally different from ours that I cannot bear them. They are always artificial and never the least like life. Our plays are like life.” Talking of London, he said when he arrived there he realised that the Continent was one thing and England a totally different thing. He said he could not understand thousands of poor people paying a shilling to see a football match. He had lived in an English family. He admired the neatness and the cleanliness of everything. He thought the hospitality of the English was great. He said the point of view of moral superiority was extraordinary. The way an Englishwoman he had known had spoken of Indians and Chinese as something so infinitely inferior, too, had surprised and amused him. The sailor brother put in a few remarks and was contradicted. The glass of beer which had followed the eighth tumbler of vodka now took its effect, and he said that a man present had morally spat three times in his face, and that he was not going to stand it any longer. His brother said that if he was not quiet he would go. He refused to be quieted, and so the company broke up. _July 9th._ To-day I went to the Duma with a translation of Herbert Spencer for Nazarenko. I also took him a translation of Shelley’s poems and a translation of “Œdipus Rex.” “There,” I said, “are the poems of a man called Shelley.” “You mean,” he answered, “the man who was drowned.” He took up the “Œdipus Rex,” and read three verses out of it. “Modern poetry depends for its beauty on its outward form,” he said. “It is all words; but if you read two lines of ancient poetry like this you see that it contains a whole philosophy.” _July 11th._