limbs the beat of a single heart; of their progress from quietness and vast illiteracy to being confident possessors of a strong voice in the counsels of nations; of their progress from denial and anarchism and individual obstinacy to affirmation, coöperation, and readiness to

serve.

As nations go, Great Britain is like a man of forty-five, Germany like a man of thirty, but Russia like a genius who is just eighteen. It is the young man that you find in Russia: virginal, full of mystery, looking out at a world full of color and holiness and passion and sordidness.

Despite the beauty and self-sufficiency of the old life, Russia is definitely committing herself to the new. She is going to have a puritan intolerance for sin; she is beginning to manifest that passion for solid education that has marked Puritan Scotland, America, Germany. More and more people are going to take up with materialism and ethics and agnosticism. Not that Russian pilgrimaging or asceticism or religious observance can ever cease, or that the mystical outlook will be lost. But Westernism and success and national facetiousness and lightheartedness will be more clamorous.

I am a great admirer of the popular saint, Father Seraphim. He is the Russian St. Francis: he tamed the bears and the wolves and the birds of the forest of Sarof. He was so holy that bears, so far from hurting him, actually inconvenienced him a little by their officious helpfulness. But his chief claim to holiness lies in his mystical denial of life. He lived alone in the forest, wore a heavy cross on his back, and prayed a thousand days and a thousand nights, still kneeling on the same stone; he made a vow of silence and did not open his mouth to speak for twenty-five years, and when the end of the twentyfive years came, he remained silent for

ten years more. Such an act of denial is called a podvig.

I spoke of the podvig this autumn to Loosha, a woman friend of mine of whom I wrote in Changing Russia. I was working out the essential idea of Russia's religion.

'I like to think that even now, in all this noise of the war, you have, in the background of Russia, men and women who have taken like Father Seraphim this oath of silence, who will never utter a word whether Russia wins or seems to be in danger. It is an astonishing fact that he was silent throughout the whole time of the great Napoleonic campaigns, and did not utter a word even in the culminating distress of the capture of Moscow in 1812.' So said I to Loosha. Loosha replied,

"That is old-fashioned. Seraphim's greater feat and that which did indeed make him a holy man, was when at last he renounced silence, and, after thirtyfive years, opened his mouth once more to converse, not oracularly, but kindly and cheerfully and wisely, with his fellow beings. I think spring is a greater victory than autumn. It is a victory over death, whereas autumn is a victory over life.'

To this, Western minds will readily give assent. It is a purely Western idea. But it is a new feeling in Russia. A few years ago, Loosha was of opinion that she herself was really dead and that the woman who spoke to me was but a shadow, a ghost, something without warmth, without heart, without hope. She was glad to have conquered life. Now she wants to conquer death and win again.

Russia the silent one, silent for twenty-five years and then silent for ten years more, is either speaking now, or is about to speak. The spirit moves mysteriously in her. She begins to know that her time is at hand.

I

I HAVE known London in many moods and phases, which is natural, as I have lived in London for the greater part of thirty years. But never have I known it as it is to-day under the shadow of war. Not that this is the first time in my experience that the shadow has fallen. But hitherto war has been no nearer than Asia or Africa, quite another matter from war just beyond the Channel, with the chance thrown in of the invasion England has not had to face since William the Conqueror, or to fear since Napoleon, and with an occasional warning, in the shelling of an East Coast town, of what invasion means. And, certainly, if London since my coming has never been under so near and so heavy a shadow, neither has it ever seemed to me so extraordinary and so interesting.

Before Great Britain had declared war, the fear of war held London in its grasp. I have read the boast of some Englishmen that the turmoil in Europe and their own plunge headlong into the depths could not stir them out of their natural stolidity. But they were not in London when they boasted. In London the tension could be felt; the knowledge of what such a war must involve, the unthinkable risks, the magnitude of the enterprise and its cost, weighed upon the town like the sense of doom in an old Greek tragedy; the shrinking from the catastrophe was so unmistakable that no White Paper was needed to explain how far Great Britain was

from being its immediate cause. And the very season added to the effect, tightened the tension. The end of July as a rule brings to London the repose that makes it, in my opinion, the most desirable place to spend the late summer and early autumn in. But there could be no repose while this unspoken dread, this fever of waiting filled the air. The money and food panics of that long week of suspense came almost as a relief, giving everybody something to do or an excuse to do it. I know that when the bank rate began to go up by leaps and bounds, and the Stock Exchange closed its doors, and gold disappeared, and Penny Saving Funds were besieged, and rumors were everywhere of men driving from bank to bank and filling their motors mountain high with sovereigns, I passed an agitated quarter of an hour trying to decide whether or no I ought to fetch and bring home, under my arm, my own little molehill. And if I had the sense to keep my head in this crisis, I lost it when London prepared for famine as well as bankruptcy; hurrying to Jackson's, -the grocers who sell American delicacies in Piccadilly, — I invested in enough canned corn and lima beans, Virginia pickles and California olives, gumbo soup and clam chowder, to save my family from starvation for at least a fortnight. It was absurd, I confess, but I score now over my more practical friends who invested in such sensible things as macaroni, dried peas, rice, tapioca, and the cereals they never eat if they can help themselves, in such

West, North and South, to the centre of London; the degenerates who emerge from none but the police know where at any public crisis, and who, throughout the week, drifted into our corner of easy-going, open-all-day front doors, until we had to remind our housekeeper again what locks and keys and hallboys are made for. But there were also the crowds I am not used to; for now war and not merely the fear of it had London in its grasp: everywhere officers wearing in broad daylight, without shame, the uniform that at normal times they would rather die than let the public see them in; and soldiers in khaki, and recruits in any clothes under the sun, and Red Cross ambulances, and nurses, and trains of business-like artillery, and wagons laden with fieldtelegraph and telephone apparatus, and armored motors, and tents, and more soldiers and horses in the parks, all the machinery of war in a town accustomed only to the parade of war; and, sprung from the gutter, hawkers selling little flags and war-buttons and caricatures of the Kaiser. To add to the uproar and congestion and confusion, at our end of the Strand and at the top of Parliament Street, the road had been taken up for the summer mending, war not having entered into the contracts of peaceful borough councils; and busses and motors and taxis and carts were blocked for squares, and every time I went out or came home I had to push my way through the seething, gaping, bewildered crowds and cross the congested streets at the risk of my life.

And just when not an inch of room seemed left in our part of the town, the American invasion of London, now passed into history, began: Americans flying from France and Belgium and Germany and Austria; Americans with passage on German boats no longer running; Americans with passage on French and British boats turned into

cruisers and transports; Americans with not a cent except on letters of credit and travelers' cheques which not a bank was open to cash; Americans with their nerves shattered and their manners lost; Americans grieved and shocked that Europe could go to war at a moment so inconvenient to them and allow mobilization to interfere with their comforts and luxuries as tourists; Americans congregating in and near American steamship offices and American bankers and American agents, for mutual support and encouragement and indignation; Americans haunting St. Martin's Churchyard, although to have discovered one special trunk in the pile of American luggage dumped there would have been about as easy as finding the proverbial needle in the haystack; Americans flying to the newly constituted American Committee at the Savoy, demanding passports over the counter, until the Haymarket and Pall Mall and Cockspur Street and the Strand were converted into a little America; until my native American became the common language of the London streets; until the steamship companies and clerks had no time for anything more than the soothing of scared schoolma'ams and the heartening of timid university professors; until Brown, Shipley and Co.'s was the scene of a daily Philadelphia reception; until I began to think that there was nobody in London except Americans and soldiers, - altogether a mad, topsy-turvy, unbelievable London.

An unbelievable London even as I saw it without crossing the threshold of our flat. For the American invasion swept on to our terrace, into our house, up in our lift. From the Haymarket and Pall Mall and Cockspur Street and the Strand, Little America adjourned to our rooms; we held a daily Philadelphia reception in rivalry to Brown, Shipley and Co. I had not heard so

much American talked in a year; I could not have seen more Americans in the same length of time had I been at home. And each came with a tale of adventure, a special grievance, a case of nerves. This one had been held up in France, this one in Germany; some had escaped with the clothes on their backs and some had not lost as much as a pin; some had commandeered special trains and some were forced to travel with the troops; some had lost their steamers and were sailing in the steerage, and some had not lost their steamers but had made up their minds they were going to; some had just arrived on steamers guarded by cruisers, and some were just going on steamers through waters strewn with mines. Most of them - fortunately not all were convinced that the war had begun when it did simply to annoy them, and too many were not only annoyed but frightened, losing their heads, as well as their manners, to say nothing of their good solid flesh, I am told that more than one went home several pounds lighter than he left. I am puzzled to this day to understand why my fellow country-people, who face their own wars with courage, should have been so routed by a war other people have to fight.

The daily reception which we were surprised into holding was as English as American. Apparently, after the orgy of Bank holidays nobody could get back to business again. Publishers, whom as a rule we must beg humbly beforehand for a morning interview, dropped in at eleven for no reason except that, as they were doing nothing at their office, they thought they might as well come round and do it with us. Directors of galleries whom we had not seen in a year made equally early visits with no excuse whatever save to retail the gossip of their clubs. Women, whose calls are usually ceremonies,

rushed in at any hour because they were passing on their way to the numerous women's aid societies that had sprung up like mushrooms in our neighborhood. Writers came because they had no heart to write articles and books which nobody wanted. Artists appeared, recklessly squandering the best hours of daylight, because their every commission was canceled, and also because, had they had work to do, they could not have done it. Nobody could do any work, and as nobody would let us do ours, we put it up and accepted the inevitable. Other friends, who had given up their old tasks only to take on new ones, dropped in to show themselves off with the special constable's baton in their pocket or the red cross on their arm, in Yeomanry or Territorial uniform, in Despatch Bearer's or Special Intelligencer's outfit.

Another of the rare humors of these dreadful months was the spectacle of an Englishman to whom long generations of ancestors have bequeathed but few short feet of stature, pirouetting round that we might enjoy him from every point of view in his new khaki, proud as a small boy in the first cowboy suit or first Indian feathers; while Augustine with whom he is on excellent terms, but whose prejudice is for the substantial red trousers and blue coat of France-laughed to scorn his fine braiding and belting, his jaunty spurs and cap and cane, calling them 'rien que de la fantaisie.'

And the excitement trickled in, not only by way of the lift, but at the back stairs. Augustine, whose sixteen years in England have taught her no English, was perpetually summoning me to get the latest budget of news from every messenger and tradesman's boy, and above all from my ice-man, who would have made the fortunes of the yellow press: in a week he had sunk the German Navy and driven the German