it described what he had known that set his imagination to work, that drove home its purport and made of it a lead to his blind and whirling emotions. He read and re-read while he quivered with impatience at its failure; if the man had seen what he had seen, if the man had lost what he had lost, he could not have argued so tamely. His pen would have been dipped in fire; he would have written so that all men reading him would have rushed to arms. The paper dropped from his hands to the table and he sat staring at a picture of his own making—of a crowd bitter and determined, moved by the tale of wrongdoing to a righteous and terrible wrath. He saw it setting forth to execute justice and avenge innocent blood ... and himself one of it, spurring and urging it on. So he first visualized himself as a soldier—an unscientific combatant of the Homeric pattern, but nevertheless a soldier. The vision thrilled and inspired him, and out of the deep waters of his impotent misery he clutched at the knowledge that he could act, resent, resist; that, ceasing to suffer as the slave suffers, he could give back blow for blow. There was enough of the old leaven in him to bring him up suddenly, and with something like a round turn, as he realized that the act of striking blow for blow against the German would involve the further act of enlistment and the wearing of the King’s uniform. His first mental vision of his warrior crowd had been vague as well as Homeric; he had only seen faces uplifted by courage, not the khaki and buttons below them—seeing himself rather as an avenger of Griselda than as a soldier of the British Empire. But it was only for a moment that he shied Like a nervous horse at the bogey of the "hired assassin." The prophets from whom he had learned his one-time contempt for the soldier were no longer prophets to him, and his conversion was the more thorough from his ingrained and extremist conviction that the opposite of wrong must be right. Conversion, in the sense in which the word is employed by the religious, describes most clearly the process through which he had passed: conviction of ignorance, the burden of Christian; a sense of blind longing and humiliated confusion—and now, at the end, light flashed on him suddenly, salvation figured by the sword.... It was, so to speak, but a partial salvation. He had lost his capacity for absolute faith, for the rapture that comes of infallibility; but he was of all men the last who could live without guidance, and his new creed had at least this merit—it was supported by his own experience. Its articles, had he formulated them, would have been negative rather than assertive—I have ceased to believe in the old, rather than I believe in the new; but it gave him that working hypothesis without which Life to him was impossible.