"Thy posterity shall sway!" I recalled the solemn splendour of another great Queen's passing--that which I had seen with my own eyes while still a lad at Rugby: the stately gathering of the great ships at Spithead; the end of Victoria the Good. No more than a step it seemed from my vision of the unconquerable Boadicea. But to that other onslaught upon Colchester--to General von Fuechter's slaughter of women and children and unarmed men in streets of houses whose ashes must be warm yet--O Lord, how far! I thought. Could it really be that a thousand years of inviolability had been broken, ended, in those few wild days; ended for ever? Lights twinkled now among the nestling houses of the little place where I was born. They made me think of torches, the clash of arms, the spacious mediaeval days when Davenham Minster supported a great monastery, whose lordly abbot owned the land Tarn Regis stood upon. And then the little lights grew misty and dim in my eyes as glimpses came of my own early days; of play on that very ridge-side where I sat now, where I had then romantically sworn friendship with George Stairs on the eve of my departure for Elstree School, and his leaving with his father for Canada. How had I kept my vow? Where was George Stairs now? There was not a foot of that countryside we had not roamed together. My eyes pricked as I looked and listened. Exactly so, I thought, the sheep-bells had sounded below Barebarrow when I had lain listening to them in that low-pitched back bedroom of the Rectory which I had been proud to hear called "Dick's Room," after my first experience of sleeping alone. Then for a space my mind was blank as the dark valley beyond the village--until thoughts and pictures of recent happenings began to oust the gentler memories, and I lived over again the mad, wild, tragic week which culminated in the massacre of the North London trenches. But in the light of my previous musings I saw these happenings differently, more personally, than in the actual experience of them. It seemed now that not my country only, but myself, had been struck down and humbled to the dust by the soldiers of the Kaiser. I saw the broad fair faces of the German cavalry as they had sat their horse in Whitehall on the evening of Black Saturday. I heard again the clank of their arms, the barking of guttural orders. Could it be that they had mastered England? that for nine long years we were to be encircled by their garrisons? Nine years of helotry! A sudden coolness in the air reminded me of the lateness of the hour, and I rose and began to cross Barebarrow.