couch waiting for another day and another chance to dare the killing eyes of beauty. The French will be French! Even in the dungeon, say the old gallants, they longed for the most murderous gleam of beauty. Better that and annihilation than the long night of safety. Leaning out of his desperate window this or that prisoner, if he beheld some lady walking in the courtyard, would fix his admiration upon her and bend every effort to draw in his direction that killing look. Is there not a story by Kenneth Graham about a headswoman in some courteous region who became so popular that the whole world masculine swarmed to her begging to be slain as a tender personal favour? And did they not swarm so numerously that it embarrassed the land and almost stripped it of its finest heroes because they chose death by the delicate headswoman rather than life at any less exquisite hands whatever? I do not know whether it was in this fashion that the prisoners of the Bolsheviki behaved, but I suspect that something of the sort might have happened, so true to form does their ancient gallantry seem to have run. It might have happened; it must have happened. For this is not, after all, history we are talking about. It is romance, romance joyfully conscripted in the war against the enemies of the old order and naturally using the old, old tricks. CHAIRS Here and there in the rural districts people still talk about professors as holding chairs in this or that subject at some college or university. When they do this they make me remember that the chair was once cousin to the throne. It was an affair of some state. Our remotest ancestors did not sit on chairs; they sat on branches when they had time to sit at all. Our mediate ancestors, having come down to earth, sat on it, or on the floors of the houses they built, or on any odd piece of furniture that came handy. Chairs marked the great who used them, such as kings and senators and bishops. Only our most immediate ancestors, in the last few centuries, ever thought of having enough chairs to go round. Within the memory of plenty of living men quite respectable households, even in the United States, have required children to stand at meals, partly because there were more children than chairs and partly because it did not seem worth while to get more chairs for the relatively unimportant members of the household. Now everybody has chairs—even infants and dolls and dogs and cats; even prisoners in jails; even professors, in fact as well as name. The race has grown sedentary.