l possessions of mankind. If only those temporarily in charge of
them could be forced somehow to remember that, when their brief mayoral,
or otherwise official, lives are past, there will be found those who
will need to look upon what they have destroyed, and who will curse them
in their graves.

Putting aside such merely superficial "changes" as new streets, new
theatres, and new conveniences, there does seem to me one change of a
far higher importance for which I have no direct evidence, and which I
can only hint at, even to myself, as "something in the air." It is, of
course, nothing new either to London or to England. It is rather the
reawakening of an old temper to which England's history has so often and
so momentously given expression. I seem to find it in a new alertness in
the way men and women walk and talk in the streets, a braced-up
expectancy and readiness for some approaching development in England's
destiny, a new quickening of that old indomitable spirit that has faced
not merely external dangers, but grappled with and resolved her own
internal problems. London seems to me like a city that has heard a voice
crying "Arise, thou that sleepest!" and is answering to the cry with
girt loins and sloth-purged heart and blithe readiness for some new
unknown summons of a future that can but develop the glory of her past.

England seems to be no more sleepily resting on her laurels, as she was
some twenty years ago. Nor does she seem, on the other hand, to show the
least anxiety that she could ever lose them. She is merely realizing
that the time is at hand when she is to win others--that one more of
those many re-births of England, so to speak, out of her own womb,
approaches, and that once more she is about to prove herself eternally
young.

New countries are apt to speak of old countries as though they are
dying, merely because they have lived so long. Yet there is a longevity
which is one of the surest evidences of youth. Such I seem to feel once
more is England's--as from my window I watch the same old English May
weather: the falling rain and the rich gloom, within which moves always,
shouldering the darkest hour, an oceanic radiance, a deathless principle
of celestial fire.

LONDON, May, 1913.

XVIII

THE HAUNTED RESTAURANT

Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant
restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted--yea, that ghosts
sit at its well appointed