I do not take kindly to war-time teas. My idea of a tea is several
cups of the best China, with three large lumps of sugar in each, and
half-a-dozen fancy-cakes with icing sugar all over them and cream in
the middle, and just a few cucumber sandwiches for the finish. (This
does sound humorous, no doubt, but I seek no credit for it. Humour
used to depend upon a sense of proportion. It now depends upon memory.
The funniest man in England at the present moment is the man who has
the most accurate memory for the things he was doing in the early
summer of 1914).

The loss of the cakes I could bear stoically enough if they would
leave my tea alone, or rather if they would allow me a reasonable
amount of sugar for it. However, we are an adaptable people and there
are ways in which even the sugar paper-dish menace can be met. My own
plan, here offered freely to all my fellow-sufferers, provides an
admirable epitome of War and Peace. The sugar allowance being about
half what it ought to be, I take half of the cup unsweetened, thus
tasting the bitterness of war, and then I put in the sugar and bask
in the sunshine of peace.

On this particular occasion peace was on the point of being declared
when I found my attention irresistibly compelled by the man sitting
opposite to me, the only other occupant of my table. At first I
thought of asking him not to stare at me so rudely, and then I found
that he was not looking at me but over my shoulder at some object at
the end of the room. I can resist the appeal of three hundred people
gazing into the sky at the same moment, but the intense concentration
of this man was too much for me. I turned round. Seeing nothing
unusual I turned back again, but it was too late. My sugar had