You wondered, if you were a blithering, neurotic American, for example, what _would_ stir the British temperament into something faintly resembling ardor and emotion. Zeppelins came, despite Mr. Churchill’s swagger that a horde of "aeroplane hornets" was ready to greet and sting them. They came periodically, leaving destruction in their wake, but the coast towns are one hundred fifty miles away from London, and nobody cared. They had demonstrated, it was true, that England was no longer an island, but "they can’t reach London--that’s one sure thing," and, "anyway, the time to worry about that was when they tried it." Was not the metropolis magnificently equipped with searchlights, even if the sky-pirates should attempt the impossible and try to pick their way up the Thames in the dark? Then, always, there were those "hornets," and "British coolness." "Scarborough Shelled by German Cruisers!" So ran the newspaper posters in the streets at midday of December 16th, 1914, an announcement grim with historical import. For the first time in centuries the sacred shores of these sea-girt isles had felt the impact of bombardment. The raid extended far along the Yorkshire coast. Whitby and Hartlepool had been attacked--there were a hundred deaths in the latter alone. Material damage was extensive; homes, shops, hotels, churches, hospitals were struck and shattered. Yet England was "calm." It did not matter in the least that there was a list of seven hundred Britons dead and injured, or that the Kaiser’s "Canal Fleet" apparently _was_ able to risk a sortie in the North Sea. What mattered most was that the islanders still alive were _unmoved and immovable_. That the "baby-killers" by air and water had signally failed to "excite" or "frighten" the country was the circumstance which made incomparably the liveliest appeal to the imagination. Kitchener’s astute recruiting advertisers shrieked "Remember Yarmouth!" (where the Zeppelins had been) and "Avenge Scarborough!" across the top of their newest posters, but West End London, where the seats of the mighty are, and where the opinion which gives tone to national thought is molded, remained Gibraltarian. A flock of British aeroplanes assailed Cuxhaven on Christmas Day by way of "reprisal" for the intermittent Zeppelin raids over English territory. The attack was not noteworthy in its results, but it gave a fresh fillip to British confidence that "everything was all right."