The most romantic revolutionary story I know is the one Peters told me himself about his return to Russia, bound up as it was with Sir Roger Casement’s execution. Up until the day of that unhappy event he was immersed in the life of London and almost untouched by the struggle in Russia. He had a comfortable post in an export house, an English wife and a baby whom he adored. Quite naturally thoughts of revolution had grown vague and alien to his mind. So it was that, wrapped in British complacency, on a gray morning he started happily to work and encountered unexpectedly a little company of Irish folk bound for the Tower of London. At first he must have looked at them as he would have regarded any other procession. But he noticed, to his surprise, how emotional they were. Tears ran down their faces of which they were unashamed. He remembered then that this was the day when Sir Roger Casement was to die. Something, he said, made him follow that crowd, although they were going in an opposite direction from his office. Can you imagine the punctilious Mr. Peters, so highly efficient, never a minute late, for a reason unexplainable to himself, following a little group of Irish mourners? Perhaps he had even grown English enough to be a little embarrassed at his impulsiveness. He described how he stood when the others knelt down outside the prison and began to pray. He would never forget, he said, how he suddenly realized what a vast, irreconcilable temperamental barrier lay between the English and the Irish people. By the time the bugler announced the execution, Jacob Peters was another man. Something called conscience or national pride or revolutionary honor awoke in him and with it came a deep homesickness for Mother Russia. He felt himself burning with shame. It was as if Sir Roger Casement were pointing a finger at him and saying, “See how I am able to die, you who once called yourself a revolutionist.” Those devout people reminded him of the Russian peasants; they had the potency of an old tune. We have all seen men weep over some dear, familiar melody. Peters never went back to work. He walked the London streets all day, wandered along the docks, watched the great ships and thought about Russia. All the dreams of his youth returned. At night he went home and told his wife he was going to Petrograd. It seems almost regrettable that Sir Roger Casement could not have known that in that multitude come to mourn his death, was a little London clerk who, by the power of association, was somehow transformed into one of the characters that now make Russian history.