ning letters of
approval all the morning. "Never," said he, "have we had a stunt catch
on so quickly. 'Why should that bally German round the corner get my
custom?' and so forth. Britain for the British!"

"Rather bad luck," I said, "on people who've paid us the compliment of
finding this the best country to live in!"

"Bad luck, no doubt," he replied, "_mais la guerre c'est la guerre_. You
know Harburn, don't you? Did you see the article he wrote? By Jove, he
pitched it strong."

When next I met Harburn himself, he began talking on this subject at
once.

"Mark my words, Cumbermere, I'll have every German out of this country."
His grey eyes seemed to glint with the snap and spark as of steel and
flint and tinder; and I felt I was in the presence of a man who had
brooded so over the German atrocities in Belgium that he was possessed
by a sort of abstract hate.

"Of course," I said, "there have been many spies, but----"

"Spies and ruffians," he cried, "the whole lot of them."

"How many Germans do you know personally?" I asked him.

"Thank God! Not a dozen."

"And are they spies and ruffians?"

He looked at me and laughed, but that laugh was uncommonly like a snarl.

"You go in for 'fairness,'" he said; "and all that slop; take 'em by the
throat--it's the only way."

It trembled on the tip of my tongue to ask him whether he meant to take
the Holsteigs by the throat, but I swallowed it, for fear of doing them
an injury. I was feeling much the same general abhorrence myself, and
had to hold myself in all the time for fear it should gallop over my
commonsense. But Harburn, I could see, was giving it full rein. His
whole manner and personality somehow had changed. He had lost geniality,
and that good-humoured cynicism which had made him an attractive
companion; he was as if gnawed at inwardly--in a word, he already had a
fixed idea.

Now, a cartoonist like myself has got to be interested in the psychology
of men and things, and I brooded over Harburn, for it seemed to me
remarkable that one whom I had always associated with good humour and
bluff indifference should be thus obsessed. And I formed this theory
about him: 'Here'--I said to myself--'is one of Cromwell's Ironsides,
born out of his age. In the slack times of peace he discovered no outlet
for the grim within him--his fire could never be lighted by love,
therefore he drifted in the waters of indifferentism. Now suddenly in
this grizzly time he has fo