"I want to tell you about the most haunting and dramatic episode I have encountered during these years of war," he wrote. "It was a thing so slight that I hardly know how to put it into words. It couldn't be painted, because it includes two separate scenes, and also--in paint--it would be impossible to avoid the merely sentimental effect. "It happened in London, during the very early days of the struggle. One afternoon, I was riding down Regent Street on the top of a bus. The pavements were crowded with the usual throng. Women in furs were peering into the windows of the shops. Newspaper boys were bawling the latest lies. Once, I thought I saw a great scribble of the Hand that writes history, where a theater poster, displaying a serpentine woman, a kind of Aubrey-Beardsley vampire, was half obliterated by a strong diagonal bar of red, bearing the words, '_Kitchener wants a hundred thousand men_.' My mind was running on symbols that afternoon, and I wondered if it did perhaps mean the regeneration of art and life in England at last. "Then we overtook a strange figure, a blind man, tapping the edge of the pavement with a rough stick, cut out of some country hedgerow. He was carrying, in his left hand, a four-foot pole, at the top of which there was nailed a board, banner-wise, about three feet long and two feet wide. On the back of the board, as we overtook him, I read the French text in big red letters: 'VENEZ A MOI, VOUS TOUS QUI ETES TRAVAILLÉS ET CHARGÉS, ET JE VOUS SOULAGERAI.' "On the other side of the board, as we halted by the curb a little in front of him, there was the English version of the same text, in big black letters: 'COME UNTO ME, ALL YE THAT LABOR AND ARE HEAVY-LADEN, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST.' "The blind man was tall and lean-faced, and held himself very upright. He was poorly dressed, but very clean and neat. The tap of his stick was like the smart tap of a drum, and he marched more rapidly than any of those who were going in the same direction. "There were several things about him that puzzled me. There was no advertisement of any sect, or any religious meeting, nothing but the two texts on his placard. He went past us like a soldier, and he carried it like the flag of his regiment. He did not look as if he were asking for alms. The pride on his face forbade the suggestion; and he never slackened his quick pace for a moment. He seemed entirely unrelated to the world around him. "Possibly, I thought, he was one of those pathetic beings whose emotions had been so stirred by the international tragedy that, despite their physical helplessness, they were forced to find some outlet. Perhaps he was an old soldier, blinded in some earlier war. Perhaps he was merely a religious fanatic. In any case, in the great web of the world's events, he seemed to be a loose fantastic thread; and although he was carrying a more important message than any one else, nobody paid any attention to him.