to the Imperial for the second time. No, there was no
room. It had been a lovely day, only too hot, and the evening was
warm. I thought pleasantly of the Saxon Gardens and its seats.

Then Poland revealed itself. "You want a room very badly, don't you?"
said the Imperial Hotel porter. "I'll arrange it for you. But it will
cost you something. You take my card to a certain hotel, which I will
mention to you, hand it to the porter and give him a thousand marks,
and he'll fix you up at once."

So I repaired to the Hotel Vienna, opposite the Vienna station. The
night porter was very pessimistic, wouldn't take the thousand marks.
"Come back in an hour," said he in a loud voice; "if there is a room
then you'll have it; if not, you can't."

I went out to an orchestral "bar" near by and supped. When I came back
the porter asked quietly for the thousand, and gave me the key of
"Number Five." "At your service," said he, demurely.

Warsaw has greatly changed during the time I have known it, from the
days of panic and police-assassinations in 1906, when the miserable
green waggons of open horse-trams woggled along the main ways, and it
seemed a city of endless cobbled stones. Warsaw was being governed by
Russia much as we govern Ireland now, and murders of constabulary
alternated with reprisals in which the innocent suffered more than the
guilty. Strangely enough, the relentless methods of official Russia
succeeded in subduing the revolutionaries, and in a few years was seen
a calm and prosperous condition of affairs which lasted until the
outbreak of the late war. A handsome service of electric trams and a
great new bridge over the Vistula raised Warsaw's level from an
external point of view, and made it something like a modern city. Then
came the war, the German aeroplanes and their bombs, the violent
attacks and the panics, shell-fire, the blowing-up of bridges, wild
exodus of Warsaw people and entry of the Germans. Of the people who
fled into Russia in 1915 few seem to have returned. Their places have
been filled by Poles from German and Austrian Poland. The
German-speaking Pole has displaced the Pole who knew Russian.

The Germans, of course, held the city from the summer of 1915 until the
armistice, and they repaired the bridges and instituted German order in
the city. The miracle of the armistice raised Poland from death, and
now we have Warsaw as capital of a large new State. The maps of Poland
in th