I have read the ticket-collector's pamphlet, and I feel a little dazed. It is such an odd world, and the strange thing is that I never realised its queerness before. A Grand Duke is murdered in a place of which I never heard before, and whose name I cannot even now trust myself to write down correctly, and here, a thousand miles away, the result is that I am brought face to face for the first time with the problem that lay twice a day under my feet--the problem of the Cities of the Plain. A flood of light seems to have fallen on things which were aforetime hazy. Events stand out luridly and arrestingly. Here is one. I was in a far Hebridean isle when war broke out. All of a sudden there sounded the drum, "Saying Come, Freemen, come, Ere your heritage be wasted! said the quick alarming drum." And the manhood of the island sprang to their feet. Mothers gave their sons, sending them away with sobs and tears, but in the name of God. On a drizzling morning the little steamer lay at the pier, crowded with men and horses, going out to fight and die. The hawsers were loosed. The steamer churned and backed and crept away. A girl stood near me crying softly. A youth with clean-cut features, and the yearning no tongue can utter shining in his eyes, leant over the taffrail and called to her, "Not crying, Jessie?" And she wiped her cheek with the moist handkerchief, and turned a smiling face to him and said, "No, I am not crying." And the paddles churned faster, and they passed into the drizzle and the haze. Weeks later I read how one man of that regiment--the regiment of my own county--killed another ... and a few days later I read that he had done so in a drunken brawl. He was not from the island, that man, and I know not who he is. His mother doubtless sent him forth to fight as a hero for his King, and he became a murderer under the fostering of the State.