Out of Hull one morning I found myself chatting with a delightful company, several gentlemen and a lady; and modesty forbids my telling who was the one person who did not burn up any cigarettes! Later in the day a modest young woman, carrying every air of gentle breeding, was seated directly across from me at dinner. She smoked--languidly, but nevertheless smoked--between courses. And, by the way, one sees much more smoking in _public_ among women in London than he sees in Paris. For a man who is old-fashioned enough to prefer womanhood _à la_ his wife and mother the "woman of the cigarette" is very disquieting, to say the least. But not all the women of England smoke. Only a superficial observer would take a London hotel, or London down-town dining-rooms, or any number of mere incidents, as a warrant for charging English womanhood universally with the cigarette habit. I have found the mother and wife of the average Englishman quite as simple and "unmodernized" as our own American mothers and wives. New York hotel life will perhaps approach the hotel life of London; and London, we should remember, has the whole world to contend with. Her allies and their families are doing a good deal of the smoking for which she gets the credit. * * * * * Perhaps I am very old-fashioned, too, when I prefer a preacher who does not smoke; but I do. For the pastor of the church in which I find a family pew, and where I gather my sons and daughters, I continue to select a minister who knows not the weed and on whose breath the aroma of it is not found. But in London I discovered myself often in the company of clergymen who blew rings with a deftness not acquired in a fortnight. I did not allow my own discomfort to inconvenience my brethren, however. A very distinguished divine blew tobacco smoke into my nose and eyes for an hour after dinner one evening. I suffered nearly as severely as I did later from German gas in France, but I bore the infliction meekly. Three months before I should have denied that any man could have done for ten seconds what that man did for sixty minutes, and live to tell the story--without a lisp! But we have learned to do and tolerate a great many things since April, 1917, and many of us who refuse to learn to do _some things_ appreciate fully the fact that all who have the greater good at heart, who labor for the things of first and vast importance, _must work together_. In London my feet never tired of pressing the streets that led me to the golden shrines of history. I lost myself in Westminster Abbey and in the Tower. I stood upon London Bridge, and hours afterwards found myself humming the old, old chorus, "London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down." But London Bridge is not falling down. Hear the Tommies marching in the street!