had planned for himself, but had never been able to carry out, he gave his consent. We had just planned a long archæological tour in Francaria when the great war broke out." "I shall never forget the state of agitation into which this catastrophe threw him. I was about to return to Meccania in obedience to the instruction I had received, when he begged me not to go back at any cost. He had spent two sleepless nights, and his agony of mind was terrible. What he had feared for years had come to pass. He had thought it would be somehow avoided. He had been watching events very closely for the few weeks before the crisis. The day that war was declared between Luniland and Meccania, he declared his intention of going back to Meccania; but not to join in the madness of his country. He could not do much; probably he would not be allowed to do anything, but at any rate he would fight for sanity and right. My mother was eager to go back, but for other reasons. She burst out into a frenzy of abuse of Luniland. She repeated all the lies that I had heard in Meccania about the country in which she had been perfectly happy for years. She called me a coward for not being with my brothers. She said she had always been against my having come to Luniland. I knew she was hysterical, but I could hardly believe my ears. My father stood firm. He insisted on my staying. He said he should regard himself as a murderer if he consented to my going to fight for what he knew to be a monstrous crime. What my mother had said, although of course it pained me, did more to convince me that my father was right than anything he could have said. I had seen already the accounts of the Meccanian crowds shouting for war in a frenzy of martial pride. I had seen also the streets of Lunopolis, full of serious faces, awed by the thought of war and yet never wavering a moment. I had heard my own countrymen jeering at the craven spirit of the Lunilanders. It was a cruel position to be in, and in the years that followed I was tempted sometimes to regret that I had not gone back and sought peace of mind in a soldier's grave. But in my heart I was so revolted by the thought that all this horror was the work of my countrymen that I grew ashamed of being a Meccanian. For the first two years my father wrote to me constantly, and if I had had any doubts of the rightness of my conduct, what he said would have sustained me. "But that is a long story. All I need say is that it was in those years of suffering and horror that I discovered where my duty lay, and took a vow to follow it. When the war ended I would go back, and if I were the only man left in Meccania I would fight for truth and liberty. It was a quixotic vow, but I was a young man of thirty." "Well, I came back. I had to wait three years, even after the war was over, until there was an amnesty for such as I. And when I did set foot here again, the cause I had come to fight for was already lost. But I did not know it."