ity for you. You'll be able
to send off a telegram to your newspaper which will make your fortune
as a correspondent."

"I don't see that," said Bland. "If there'd been a little slaughter I
might have made something out of it. But a statue! Hang it all! One
statue is rather a poor bag for the British Fleet. The people are
proud of their navy. They've spent a lot of money on it, and they
won't like being told that it has hit nothing but a statue, after a
long morning's shooting."

Bland had not grasped my idea. For a moment I was inclined to keep it
for my own use and work it up into an article when I got time. But
Bland deserved something from me. I resisted the temptation and gave
him the idea.

"I wish," I said, "that I were a special correspondent. I'd--"

"Well," said Bland. "What would you say?"

"I should take that New Zealander who stood on the broken arch of
Westminster Bridge and--"

"Macaulay's," said Bland. "I don't think that the public would stand
him again. He's played out."

"Not in the way I mean to use him. I should, so to speak, spiritualize
him, and--"

"Hold on a minute," said Bland.

He got out a note-book and a pencil and prepared to write.

"Now," he said, "go on."

Bland's expectant attitude, and the fact that he was evidently going
to take down what I said in shorthand, embarrassed me. When I write
essays I like to work deliberately and to correct carefully. I aim at
a polished elegance of style. I do not care for the kind of offhand
composition Bland asked for.

"'Interview with a Revolutionary Peer,'" said Bland, "'Lord Kilmore on
the Ulster Situation.' You were just going to say--"

"Oh, nothing much. Only that the feelings of that New Zealander--"

"Meditating on the ruins of a shattered civilization," said Bland. "I
can put in that part myself."

"--Are nothing to yours--" I said.

"_Yours_," said Bland.

"Well, mine, if this must be an interview; but I'd rather you had the
whole credit.--Are nothing to mine when I survey the vacant pedestal
of that statue. You catch the idea now?"

"No," said Bland. "I don't. Is there one?"

"Yes, there is. These unrecognizable fragments of stone, the once
majestic statue, Ulster's loyalty."

"Good," said Bland. "I have it now." He began to write rapidly. "'To
the thoughtful mind there was something infinitely tragic in the
shattered statue of the great queen, symbol of the destruction of an
ideal. England bought the friendship