More than once during the last phase of our exciting journey to England, across the mine-strewn waters between the Hook and Harwich, I reflected that I seemed doomed to take up my residence on British soil in war-time. It was in the spring of 1900, in the anxious days between Ladysmith and Mafeking, when the tide of victory was still running in favor of the Boers, that I first arrived in London, and my lot was cast there for the succeeding year and a half of the South African struggle. I felt certain that the feverish interest with which even the sluggish British temperament had followed every detail of a campaign ten thousand miles away, and which engrossed only a fraction of the Empire’s strength, would pale into tepid insignificance compared to the concern which would be generated by a tremendous European war only a channel-crossing distant. But I had time for only one breakfast and one morning’s papers before I realized that John Bull had donned, even for Armageddon, the garment in which his bosom swells the proudest--the armor of invincible inexcitability. Actually the only wrought-up people in the British Isles during the first week of the war appeared to be the frantic American tourist refugees, who, of course, heavily outnumbered their brothers and sisters in wretchedness whom I had left behind in Germany. If it had not been for the frantic transatlantic sob and worry fraternity storming the steamship and express companies’ offices in Cockspur Street and the Haymarket on the morning of Saturday, August 8, when I went out to look for the war in London, no one could possibly have made me believe that such a thing existed. Such portions of the community as had not started for the links, the ocean, the river or the country "as usual" were demeaning themselves as self-respecting, imperturbable Britons customarily do on the edge of a "week-end." The seaside holiday season was at its zenith. The immortal "Twelfth," when grouse-shooting begins, was approaching. Everybody who was anybody was "out of town," and stayed there. It was only those fussy, fretting Americans who insisted upon losing their equilibrium and converting the most placid metropolis in the universe into a bedlam of unseemly agitation and alarm. It was "extraordinary," Englishmen said, how they resolutely declined to take a lesson from the composite stolidity of Britain, preferring to give their emotions unrestrained rein and to keep the cables hot in imperious demands for ships, gold and other panaceas for the scared and stranded. Which reminds me to say that traditional British hospitality to the stranger within the gate was never showered more graciously on American friends than in that trying hour.