And yet there were lines scattered here and there throughout the newspapers, that boded ill for the peace of the world. How little we dreamed of what was coming while crowded London audiences applauded Jimmy Greggson in the "Dance of the Varalette." The River was ablaze with multi-coloured sweaters, vast crowds planked their gate-money to witness cricket-matches, lawn-tennis and polo-matches, Flying contests, and bouts between International champions at the ancient game of fisticuffs. Even while the handsome young French heavy-weight Carpentier was whacking the Yankee Smith at Olympia, white-faced, weary-eyed men of great affairs were spending the hot hours of the July days and nights—_minus_ a stray half-hour for a meal and a snatched eyeful of sleep now and then—in reading reports in cipher sent by lesser men, agents of the Secret Intelligence Department—who were registered as numbers and owned no names. These told of vast preparations long complete, and terrible designs perfect and perfecting. Poison-fruit, grown and matured in shade, now bursting-ripe and ready to kill. The aërials thrilled, the long waves travelled through invisible ether, carrying the despatches for the weary-eyed men. The despatches were not all in cipher. Thus little polyglot employés, youthful radiotelegraphic operators in charge of ship-stations in Territorial or foreign waters, or Wireless posts quite recently established on foreign frontiers, found themselves sharers in the secret councils of Ambassadors, Emperors, Kings, and Presidents. In their ear-pieces such words as "situation," "utmost gravity," "friction avoided," "Triple Alliance," and "Triple Entente," were repeated over and over. To them the tuned spark sang what the Tsar was saying to his Cousin of Great Britain and the Dominions overseas. They heard the British Foreign Secretary talking from Downing Street to the British Ambassador at Berlin, and the British Ambassador at Paris, and the French President, on a visit to Tsarskoe Selo, replying to _communiqués_ from the Quai d’Orsay. Also de Munsen from the Embassy at Vienna, confirming Whitehall views as to the extreme gravity of the Austro-Servian situation. Last, but not least, the voice from a certain guarded sanctum in the Kaiserlicher Palais on the Schloss Platz, Berlin, saying in a cipher of grouped numbers, the secret language of Hohenzollern intrigue not understood of little operators—things that bleached the face of the listener in London to the yellow of old cheese.