nearly all Atheists up to
the time of the French Revolution, but since that event (beneficial
in such various ways) had been very devout. He was a Royalist, a
Nationalist, and a perfectly sincere patriot in that particular style
which consists of ceaselessly asserting that one's country is not so
much in danger as already destroyed. He wrote cheery little articles for
the Royalist Press entitled "The End of France" or "The Last Cry,"
or what not, and he gave the final touches to a picture of the Kaiser
riding across a pavement of prostrate Parisians with a glow of patriotic
exultation. He was quite poor, and even his relations had no money. He
walked briskly to all his meals at a little open cafe, and he looked
just like everybody else.

Living in a country where aristocracy does not exist, he had a high
opinion of it. He would yearn for the swords and the stately manners of
the Pommards before the Revolution--most of whom had been (in theory)
Republicans. But he turned with a more practical eagerness to the one
country in Europe where the tricolour has never flown and men have never
been roughly equalized before the State. The beacon and comfort of
his life was England, which all Europe sees clearly as the one pure
aristocracy that remains. He had, moreover, a mild taste for sport and
kept an English bulldog, and he believed the English to be a race of
bulldogs, of heroic squires, and hearty yeomen vassals, because he read
all this in English Conservative papers, written by exhausted little
Levantine clerks. But his reading was naturally for the most part in the
French Conservative papers (though he knew English well), and it was in
these that he first heard of the horrible Budget. There he read of the
confiscatory revolution planned by the Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer,
the sinister Georges Lloyd. He also read how chivalrously Prince Arthur
Balfour of Burleigh had defied that demagogue, assisted by Austen the
Lord Chamberlain and the gay and witty Walter Lang. And being a brisk
partisan and a capable journalist, he decided to pay England a special
visit and report to his paper upon the struggle.

He drove for an eternity in an open fly through beautiful woods, with a
letter of introduction in his pocket to one duke, who was to introduce
him to another duke. The endless and numberless avenues of bewildering
pine woods gave him a queer feeling that he was driving through the
countless corridors of a dream. Yet the