rs? It's sacred history!'

I showed him a paper which I conceived would be after his own heart,
in that it was modelled on American lines.

'That's homey,' he said, 'but it's not the real thing. Now, I should
like one of these fat old _Times_ columns. Probably there'd be a
bishop in the office, though.'

When we reached London Keller disappeared in the direction of the
Strand. What his experiences may have been I cannot tell, but it
seems that he invaded the office of an evening paper at 11.45 a.m. (I
told him English editors were most idle at that hour), and mentioned
my name as that of a witness to the truth of his story.

'I was nearly fired out,' he said furiously at lunch. 'As soon as I
mentioned you, the old man said that I was to tell you that they
didn't want any more of your practical jokes, and that you knew the
hours to call if you had anything to sell, and that they'd see you
condemned before they helped to puff one of your infernal yarns in
advance. Say, what record do you hold for truth in this country,
anyway?'

'A beauty. You ran up against it, that's all. Why don't you leave the
English papers alone and cable to New York? Everything goes over
there.'

'Can't you see that's just why?' he repeated.

'I saw it a long time ago. You don't intend to cable then?'

'Yes, I do,' he answered, in the over-emphatic voice of one who does
not know his own mind.

That afternoon I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that
run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava,
over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways
floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are
never rebuilt, and by river steps hewn, to the eye, from the living
rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing
there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries
circling round the head of Litchfield A. Keller, journalist, of
Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A., whose mission it was to make the Britishers sit
up.

He stumbled gasping into the thick gloom, and the roar of the traffic
came to his bewildered ears.

'Let's go to the telegraph-office and cable,' I said. 'Can't you hear
the New York _World_ crying for news of the great sea-serpent, blind,
white, and smelling of musk, stricken to death by a submarine
volcano, and assisted by his loving wife to die in mid-ocean, as
visualised by an American citizen, the breezy, newsy, brainy
newspaper man of Da