ined the army, and so has Day's eldest boy, while you
have been going on like a confounded pro-German."

"You've no right to say that, Major Meredyth."

"Not when you go over to Godbury"--the surging metropolis of the County
some fifteen miles off--"and tell a pack of fools to strike because
this is a capitalists' war? Not when you go round the mills here, and
do your best to stop young fellows from fighting for their country? God
bless my soul, in whose interests are you acting, if not Germany's?"

He put on his best platform manner. "I'm acting in the best interests
of the people of this country. The war is wrong and incredibly foolish
and can bring no advantage to the working man. Why should he go and be
killed or maimed for life? Will it put an extra penny in his pocket or
his widow's? No. Oh!"--he checked my retort--"I know everything you
would say. I see the arguments every day in all your great newspapers.
But the fact remains that I don't see eye to eye with you, or those you
represent. You think one way, I think another. We agree to differ."

"We don't," said I. "I don't agree at all."

"At any rate," he said, "I can't see how a difference of political
opinion can affect my ability now to put a new chimney-stack in your
house, any more than it has done in the past."

"In the past," said I, "political differences were parochial squabbles
in comparison with things nowadays. You're either for England, or
against her."

He smiled wryly. "I'm for England. We both are. You think her salvation
lies one way. I think another. This is a free country in which every
man has a right to his own opinion."

"Exactly so," said I. "Therefore you'll admit that I've a right to the
opinion that you ought to be locked up either in a gaol or a lunatic
asylum as a danger to the state, and that, having that rightful
opinion, I'm justified in not entrusting the safety of my house to one
who, in my aforesaid opinion, is either a criminal or a lunatic."

Dialectically, I had him there. It afforded me keen enjoyment. Besides
being a John Bull Englishman, I am a cripple and therefore ever so
little malicious.

"It's all very well for you to talk, Major Meredyth," said he, "but
your opinions cost you nothing--mine are costing me my livelihood. It
isn't fair."

"You might as well say," I replied, "that I, who have never dared to
steal anything in my life, live in ease and comfort, whereas poor Bill
Sykes, who has devoted all his