When once I had undertaken the part, I played it with what the French call _conviction_. There are many obvious reasons why the rôle, at such a time as this, should accommodate itself to the American capacity. The feeling of race is strong, and a good American could not but desire that, with the eyes of Europe fixed upon it, the English race should make a passable figure. There would be much fatuity in his saying that at such a moment he deemed it of importance to give it the support of his own striking attitude, but there is at least a kind of filial piety in this feeling moved to draw closer to it. To see how the English race would behave, and to hope devoutly it would behave well,--this was the occupation of my thoughts. Old England was in a difficult pass, and all the world was watching her. The good American feels in all sorts of ways about Old England: the better American he is, the more acute are his moods, the more lively his variations. He can be, I think, everything but indifferent; and, for myself, I never hesitated to let my emotions play all along the scale. In the morning, over the _Times_, it was extremely difficult to make up one's mind. The _Times_ seemed very mealy-mouthed--that impression, indeed, it took no great cleverness to gather--but the dilemma lay between one's sense of the brutality and cynicism of the usual utterances of the Turkish party and one's perception of the direful ills which Russian conquest was so liberally scattering abroad. The brutality of the Turkish tone, as I sometimes caught an echo of it in the talk of chance interlocutors, was not such as to quicken that race-feeling to which I just now alluded. English society is a tremendously comfortable affair, and the crudity of the sarcasm that I frequently heard levelled by its fortunate members at the victims of the fashionable Turk was such as to produce a good deal of resentful meditation. It was provoking to hear a rosy English gentleman, who had just been into Leicestershire for a week's hunting, deliver the opinion that the vulgar Bulgarians had really not been massacred half enough; and this in spite of the fact that one had long since made the observation that for a good plain absence of mawkish sentimentality a certain type of rosy English gentleman is nowhere to be matched. On the other hand, it was not very comfortable to think of the measureless misery in which these interesting populations were actually steeped, and one had to admit that the deliberate invasion of a country which professed the strongest desire to live in peace with its invaders was at least a rather striking anomaly. Such a course could only be justified by the most gratifying results, and brilliant consequences as yet had not begun to bloom upon the blood-drenched fields of Bulgaria.