Up on the heights above, at Rocco Bruna, is a Saracen-built little town with strange dark people who seldom come down from the heights. You go by shady steps between high white walls to a little chapel, and there on Sunday a beloved curé beguiles an innocent little flock with a murmuring, heavenly, sing-song voice, whilst the children with untroubled voices are like larks in a heaven above Monte Carlo, singing, "Sancta, sancta, nostra Dama priez pour nous!"
I'd rather live at Rocca Bruna than in the main seat of the Principality of Monaco. So would we all. But the devil has got such a terrible pull.
LETTERS OF TRAVEL
XVI. FROM LONDON
You would hardly think that the greatest drama in world history is being played out in Europe, and that England was taking a part. You would hardly think that England herself was in mortal danger. London astonishes the traveller. It seems entirely given over to trivial and alien interest. Betting on horses has never reached such dimensions. Whilst the street-criers of Belgrade keep calling "Politika, Politika!" and the attention of Berlin is ruefully pinned down to Reparations, and Paris is dignified and serious and national in both newspapers and conversation, you hear nothing in the streets of London but, "What's the latest, Bill?" and "I can tell you of a 'orse."
In the vestry of a fashionable church the admirers of a certain earnest preacher come to see him after the sermon. Says a lady, "Well, padre, can you tell us the great secret?"
The priest pauses and reflects.
"I suppose by the great secret you mean the love of God? I could not tell you that at once."
"Oh, no," says the lady, "I don't mean that. I mean who will be winner on June the first."
Derby Day is given in the Press the prominence of a grand European event. Descriptions of what the ladies wear at Ascot occupy as many columns in the newspaper as the condition of four million unemployed occupy lines. The attention of the public is engulfed in second-rate sport. It is not as if there were a real boom in sport. The war has effected men's physique and their nerves so that most sporting exhibitions are of the second class. Strictly speaking, it is not an interesting cricket year. But the interest in the county competitions has been whipped up by the Press till people buy special editions of papers, not for the latest news from Silesia or Turkey, or of the great strikes, but to know how Middlesex or Lancashire is getting on. England versus Australia is greatly starred. England loses matches, and the nation seems as much plunged in gloom as she was at the failures of the old South African War. In the golf and tennis and polo competitions there is a similar neurotic interest in the supposed sporting rivalry of England and America. It seems even fortunate for the mens sana of old Britain that she has failed in boxing, and that the Dempsey-Carpentier match in America did not affect our national status in our own esteem.