ctable side
street in Regents Park, or St. Johns Wood or Hampstead. One can easily
imagine him, sitting in his small, comfortable parlour and bending over
his blotting-pad in unilluminated cheerful absorption after his day's
work. It can also without any special intellectual effort be imagined
that the record might have begun with some such seemingly unprophetic
entry as follows:--

"June 29th, 1914. I made up my mind when I was at the office to-day that
I would begin to keep a diary. I have thought several times that I
would, and Harriet thinks it would be a good thing because we should
have it to refer to when there was any little dispute about dates and
things that have happened. To-night seemed a good time because there is
something to begin the first entry with. Harriet and I spent part of the
evening in reading the newspaper accounts of the assassination of the
Austrian Archduke and his wife. There seems to be a good deal of
excitement about it because he was the next heir to the Austrian throne.
The assassination occurred in Bosnia at a place called Sarajevo.
Crawshaw, whose desk is next to mine in the office, believes it will
make a nice mess for the Bosnians and Servians because they have been
rather troublesome about wanting to be united into one country instead
of two, and called Greater Serbia. That seems a silly sort of reason for
throwing bombs and killing people. But foreigners have a way of thinking
bombs settle everything. Harriet brought out her old school geography
and we looked up Sarajevo on the map of Austria-Hungary. It was hard to
find because the print was small and it was spelt Saraievo--without any
j in it. It was just on the line between Bosnia and Servia and the
geography said it was the chief city in Bosnia. Harriet said it was a
queer thing how these places on maps never seemed like real places when
you looked them up and just read their names and yet probably the people
in them were as real to themselves as we were, and there were streets in
them as real as Lupton Street where we were sitting, finding them on the
map on the sitting-room table. I said that bombs were pretty real things
and the sound of this one when it exploded seemed to have reached a long
way to judge from the newspapers and the talk in London. Harriet said my
putting it like that gave her a queer feeling--almost as if she had
heard it and it had made her jump. Somehow it seemed something like it
to me. At any rate we sa