[Illustration: "DIVERSION" IN THE BALKANS.]

* * * * *

HEROES.

If the question were put to a company of young women, "What is the most
thrilling experience you can have in a London street?" the odds are
a thousand to one that they would reply that nothing could be more
thrilling than to meet a famous actor in plain clothes and identify him.
I am not a young woman myself, but I should be inclined to share their
opinion. There is something about an actor in real life, moving along
like a human being--one of us--that always stirs my pulse. It is
exciting enough to see Mr. LLOYD GEORGE or Mr. ASQUITH or Sir OLIVER
LODGE; but no one stirs the imagination like an actor.

That is why I still tremble a little whenever I think of my good fortune
the other afternoon in the Haymarket, and why my pen shakes as I
commit the adventure to paper. For I met face to face two of the most
successful actors in London--at the present moment, in the world.

I was walking up the Haymarket in the rain, hoping, in spite of the new
prohibitive rates, that I might see an empty cab, when I met them coming
down. They were walking with a man whom I did not recognise, and, like
me, were getting wet. One thinks of successful actors as riding always
in taxis; but taxis are very rare nowadays, particularly in the wet, and
somehow it did not seem unnatural that they should be on foot. I am glad
enough that they were, or I should have missed my _frisson_; and others
would have suffered a similar loss, for the recognition was not only on
my part but on that of several passers-by, and it was instantaneous.