gates of the Tower of London before Easter Sunday?" and his eyes twinkled, "or have some of your young Americans enlisted and the fond parents sent you over to rescue them?" Edestone smiled. "Well, the first thing I want, Lindenberry, is a little chat with Lord Rockstone." "Oh, is that all?" with a satiric inflection. "Well, why in the name of common sense didn't you say so at first? I do not know, however, that I can positively get you an appointment today. You must not mind if His Lordship keeps you waiting for a few minutes if he happens to be talking with the Czar of Russia on the long-distance telephone. You know, we over here are still great sticklers on form. We are trying hard to be progressive, but we still consider it quite rude to tell a King to hold the wire while we talk to someone else who has not taken the trouble that he has to make an appointment. You must remember that he has perhaps dropped several shillings into the slot, and would naturally be annoyed if told by the girl that time was up and to drop another shilling. "Or Lord Rockstone may perhaps be just in the midst of one of his usual twenty-four-hour interviews with an American newspaper representative," he continued his chaffing. "Now if he does not invite Graves and Underhill and Apsworth to have tea with you, you might drop in at Boodles' on your way back from the city, and we will just pop on to Buckingham Palace and deliver to Queen Mary the ultimatum from the suffragette ladies of the Sioux Indians." Edestone laughed so heartily that the footman nearly turned to see if something had happened. "And they say that you Englishmen have no sense of humour. The trouble with you though, old top, is that your joke is so deucedly good that you don't see the point yourself." They were just passing through one of Rockstone's military camps, where England's recruited millions were being trained, and cutting short his badinage Edestone gazed at the scene with interest. "It does seem a pity that all these fine young fellows should be sacrificed in order to settle a question which I could settle in a very short time," he said, becoming more serious. "Settle it in a very short time?" repeated Lindenberry. "I would like to know how you propose to do it. I know you are full of splendid ideas, and invent all kinds of electrical contrivances to do things that one can do perfectly well with one's own hands. I suppose you would take a large magnet and with it pull all of the German warships out of the Kiel Canal, and hold them while you went on board and explained to Bernhardi and von Bulow the horrors of war, and if they did not listen to you, you would, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin lead them off with all the other disagreeable odds and ends, submarines and Zeppelins, to an island, way, way out in the ocean, where they would