On the following day Sir John Hampden returned from Paris. A week later and he had again left London. At the office of the League it was impossible to learn where he had gone; perhaps fishing, it was suggested. In any case he was taking a well-earned holiday and did not want to be troubled with business, so that nothing was being forwarded. A little later any one might know for the asking that he was in Berlin--and returning the next day. There was never any secret made of Sir John's movements if the office knew them, only he occasionally liked to cut himself completely off from communication in order to ensure a perfect rest. As soon as the office knew where he was, every one else could know too; only it invariably happened that he was on his way back by that time. The incident was repeated. Callers at Trafalgar Chambers found all the heads communicative and very leisured. It came out that nothing much was being done just then; it was not the time of the year for politics. For all the good they were doing three-quarters of the offices might be closed for the next few months and three-quarters of the staff take a holiday. In fact, that was what they were doing to a large extent. It was Mr Salt's turn as soon as Sir John got back. That time it was St. Petersburg. For a man who had been a sailor George Salt displayed a curious taste when he came to take his holiday. The sea had no call for him, nor the coast-line any charm. The inland resorts, the golf centres, moors, lakes, mountains and rivers, all were passed by. It was not even to an "undiscovered" village or some secluded country house that he turned his footsteps in hope of perfect change. On the contrary, where the ceaseless din of industry made rest impossible; where the puny but irresistible hands of generations of mankind had scarred the face of earth like a corroding growth, where the sky was shut out by smoke, vegetation stifled beneath a cloak of grime, day and night turned into one lurid vulcanian twilight, in which by bands and companies, by trains and outposts, dwarfish men toiled in the unlovely rhythm of hopeless, endless labour: the lupus-spots of nature; there Salt spent his holiday. Coal was the loadstone that drew him on, and in a vast contour his journey through that month defined the limits of the coal-fields of the land. In the subsequent histories of this period no mention of Salt's significant appearance in the provinces finds a place. Yet in presenting a dispassionate review of the succeeding events it is impossible to ignore its influence; although, to adopt a just proportion, it is not necessary to deal with it at length. It was not a vital detail of the scheme on which the League had staked its cause; it was less momentous than any of Hampden's three Continental missions; but by disarming opposition in certain influential quarters when the crisis came, it removed a possible cause of dissension from the first. That is its place.