"Where did you say it was?" Mr. Spokesly asked. He had not heard. "West Indies. It's a new oiling station and they want an experienced harbour-master. You see, I knew about it, oh, years ago, when the place was first projected, and I put in for it. And now he's offered it to me, I can't go. I don't have to, you see. And yet I would like to put someone in the way of it for the old chap's sake. So I say, why don't you go round and see him? Three hundred a year and quarters. It isn't so dusty, I can assure you. If I hadn't been rather lucky in my investments I would be very glad to go, I can tell you that." And the odd thing, to Mr. Spokesly's mind, was that he did not envy his elderly friend's happy position as to his investments. Here again luck masqueraded as a slippery word. Was he so lucky? From where he sat now, beneath the Arch of the great queen of the money-making, steam-engine era--the era, that is, when the steam-engines made the money and the old order fattened upon rents and royalties--Mr. Spokesly was able to see that money was no longer an adequate gauge of a man's calibre. One had to grow, and that was another name for suffering. In his hand was a newspaper, and as he turned it idly, his eye caught an urgent message in heavy type. The London School of Mnemonics pleaded with him to join up in the armies of Efficiency. They urged him to get out of the rut and fit himself for executive positions with high salaries attached. His eye wandered from the paper to the vista of the Mall, where the metallic products of efficiency were ranged in quadruple lines of ugliness, the stark witnesses of human ineptitude. He saw the children playing about those extraordinarily unlovely enemy guns, their muzzles split and dribbling with rust, their wheels splayed outwards like mechanical paralytics, and he fell to wondering if he could not find his way out of his spiritual difficulties sooner if he did what his friend suggested. He would have to do something. A few hundred pounds was all he had. And the chances of a sea job were not immediately promising. He recalled his visit the other day to the office of the owners of the _Tanganyika_, and the impression he had gained that their enthusiasm had cooled. They had done a big business with Bremen before the war, and they would be doing a big business again soon. Their attitude had contrasted oddly with the roll-of-honour tablet in the office where, printed in gold, he had seen the names of the officers of the _Tanganyika_ "murdered by the enemy." All save his own. Somehow that word "murdered," to him who had been there, did not ring true. It was like the nice schoolboy's "rotten" and "putrid"; it signified a mood, now gone no one knew where. It was like Lietherthal's "_Die Freiheit bricht die Ketten_," a gesture which meant nothing to the millions of Hindoos, Mongolians, Arabs, Africans, and Latins in the world. "A family squabble," that sharp young man had