"With Servia?" asked some one politely, with the usual vague American
notion of the Balkan states. The Bulgarian's eyes shone curiously.

"You have a sense of humor!" he said.

This man had done newspaper work in Russia and America, studied at
Harvard, and he talked about our politics, theatres, universities,
society generally. It was a pity, he said, and the result of the
comparative lack of critical spirit in America that Mr. Roosevelt had
been a hero so long. There were party papers mechanically printing their
praise or blame--"and then, of course, the New York Evening Post and the
Springfield Republican"--but no general intelligent criticism of ideas
for a popular idol to meet and answer. "On the whole, he's a good
influence--but in place of something better. It isn't good for a man to
stand so long in the bright sunshine."

That it was impossible for the Mexicans to work out their own salvation
he doubted. "I think of Bulgaria--surely our inheritance of Turkish
rule was almost as bad, and of how the nation has responded, and of the
intensive culture we had at a time when we were only a name to most
western Europeans." He was but one of those new potentialities which
every whisper from the now cloud-wrapped Continent seemed to be opening
--this tall, scholar-fighter from the comic-opera land where Mr. Shaw
placed his chocolate soldiers.

In a steamer chair a frail-looking young woman in a white polo coat
looked nervously out on the sea. She was Irish and came of a fighting
line--father, uncles, and brothers in army and navy, her husband in
command of a British cruiser, scouting the very steamship lane through