s, and a body of naval
officers whose work remained throughout this anxious period at that
standard of accuracy and professional ability which is beyond the power
of criticism or cavil.

* * * * *

The form of "frightfulness" in which the Germans placed the greatest
faith was the terrorizing of the inhabitants of unprotected enemy cities
by bombs from Zeppelins and aeroplanes. While the objects for which
these atrocities were perpetrated were not attained, hundreds of
innocent men, women, and children were murdered. The following narrative
describes one of these German air raids.

THE DEATH-SHIP IN THE SKY

PERRITON MAXWELL

Copyright Forum, August, 1916.

[Sidenote: The switchman at Walthamstow.]

For twenty-six years old Tom Cumbers had held his job as switchman at
the Walthamstow railroad junction where the London-bound trains come up
from Southend to the great city. It was an important post and old Tom
filled it with stolid British efficiency. A kindly man who felt himself
an integral part of the giant railroad system that employed him, old Tom
had few interests beyond his work, his white-haired wife, his reeking
pipe and the little four-room tenement in Walthamstow which he called
home. The latter was one of the thousands of two-storied rabbit-hatches
of sooty, yellow brick, all alike and all incredibly ugly, which
stretch, mile upon mile, from Walthamstow toward London's tumultuous
heart.

[Sidenote: The workshops near Epping Forest.]

[Sidenote: An appalling tragedy of the war.]

Within a radius of four dun miles, just on the nearer edge of Epping
Forest--the scene in a forgotten day of Robin Hood's adventurings--a
section of these huddling homes of the submerged, together with a street
of trams and some pathetic shops, constitute this town of Walthamstow.
It is a sordid, unlovely place, but for some ten thousand
wage-strugglers it is all of England. There are workshops hereabout in
which one may mingle one's copious sweat with the grime of machinery and
have fourteen shillings a week into the bargain--if one is properly
skilled and muscular and bovinely plodding. Walthamstow is not the place
where one would deliberately choose to live if bread could be earned
elsewhere with equal certainty. But for all its dirt and dullness it has
a spot on the map and a meaning in the dull souls of its inhabitants,
and here, within half an hour's train travel of the Lord Mayor