Monsieur Segotin's Story
"If you will listen to for me a little half hour"
"But," I said, "I will listen to you all night, my dear M. Segotin. I am here for that very purpose."
"Then," said he, "you shall have it. I have given it before and I have got it into shape for the telling, and no Englishman or other man who shall be ready to hear it from me shall be disappointed. For these are things, look you, which must be told and told everywhere, lest the easy-going optimistic fools prevail when it shall come to a settlement and those people be given another chance to turn God's good earth for their own profit into a slave market.
"Listen, then," he continued. "As you know, I had not long to wait; only a little over a fortnight. All that is old history—the ultimatum to Belgium, her refusal of it, and the immediate invasion of her territory. It was time for me to be leaving off my sea baths and my constitutional exercises on the digue, and to be getting back to my own place. But first, do you know what I did?
"With the help of my young assistant I carried out the whole of my stock on to the sands at low water and there I made a neat little pile of it. Over this pile I poured some gallons of paraffin oil and then I put a match to it. One of the first fires that the war lit in Belgium, my friend, but not the last. To my neighbours, who were waiting confidently for the news of victory, it was an act of madness; to me it was a symbol.
"It was also a satisfaction. Those cigars, those
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