That melancholy was completed at the barber’s.

“Shaving, sir?” inquired that artist from inside his shop.

“War!” replied Wayne, standing on the threshold.

“I beg your pardon,” said the other sharply.

“War!” said Wayne, warmly. “But not for anything inconsistent with the beautiful and the civilized arts. War for beauty. War for society. War for peace. A great chance is offered you of repelling that slander which, in defiance of the lives of so many artists, attributes poltroonery to those who beautify and polish the surface of our lives. Why should not hairdressers be heroes? Why should not...”

“Now, you get out,” said the barber, irascibly. “We don’t want any of your sort here. You get out.”

And he came forward with the desperate annoyance of a mild person when enraged.

Adam Wayne laid his hand for a moment on the sword, then dropped it.

“Notting Hill,” he said, “will need her bolder sons;” and he turned gloomily to the toy-shop.

It was one of those queer little shops so constantly seen in the side streets of London, which must be called toy-shops only because toys upon the whole predominate; for the remainder of goods seem to consist of almost everything else in the world...tobacco, exercise-books, sweet-stuff, novelettes, halfpenny paper clips, halfpenny pencil sharpeners, bootlaces, and cheap fireworks. It also sold newspapers, and a row of dirty-looking posters hung along the front of it.

“I am afraid,” said Wayne, as he entered, “that I am not getting on with these tradesmen as I should. Is it that I have neglected to rise to the full meaning of their work? Is there some secret buried in each of these shops which no mere poet can discover?”

He stepped to the counter with a depression which he rapidly conquered as he addressed the man on the other side of it...a man of short stature, and hair prematurely white, and the look of a large baby.

“Sir,” said Wayne, “I am going from house to house in this street of ours, seeking to stir up some sense of the danger which now threatens our city. Nowhere have I felt my duty so difficult as here. For the toy-shop keeper has to do with all that remains to us of Eden before the first wars began. You sit here meditating continually upon the wants of that wonderful time when every staircase leads to the stars, and every garden-path to the other end of nowhere. Is it thoughtlessly, do you think, that I strike the dark old drum of peril in the paradise of children? But consider a moment; do not condemn me hastily. Even that paradise itself contains the rumour or beginning of that danger, just as the Eden that was made for perfection contained the terrible tree. For judge childhood, even by your own arsenal of its pleasures. You keep bricks; you make yourself thus, doubtless, the witness of the constructive instinct older than the destructive. You keep dolls; you make yourself the priest of that divine idolatry. You keep Noah’s Arks; you perpetuate the memory of the salvation of all life as a precious, an irreplaceable thing. But do you keep only, sir, the symbols of this prehistoric sanity, this childish rationality of the earth? Do you not keep more terrible things? What are those boxes, seemingly of lead soldiers, that I see in that glass case? Are they not witnesses to that terror and beauty, that desire for a lovely death, which could not be excluded even from the immortality of Eden? Do not despise the lead soldiers, Mr. Turnbull.”

“I don’t,” said Mr. Turnbull, of the toy-shop, shortly, but with great emphasis.

“I am glad to hear it,” replied Wayne. “I confess that I feared for my military schemes the awful innocence of your profession. How, I thought to myself, will this man, used only to the wooden swords that give pleasure, think of the steel swords that give pain? But I am at least partly reassured. Your tone suggests to me that I have at least the entry of a gate of your fairyland...the gate through which the soldiers enter, for it cannot be denied...I ought, sir, no longer to deny, that it is of soldiers that I come to speak. Let your gentle employment make you merciful towards the troubles of the world. Let your own silvery experience tone down our sanguine sorrows. For there is war in Notting Hill.”

The little toy-shop keeper sprang up suddenly, slapping his fat hands like two fans on the counter.

“War?” he cried. “Not really, sir? Is it true? Oh, what a joke? Oh, what a sight for sore eyes!”

Wayne was almost taken aback by this outburst.

“I am delighted,” he stammered. “I had no notion...”

He sprang out of the way just in time to avoid Mr. Turnbull, who took a flying leap over the counter and dashed to the front of the shop.

“You look here, sir,” he said; “you just look here.”

He came back with two of the torn posters in his hand which were flapping outside his shop.

“Look at those, sir,” he said, and flung them down on the counter.

Wayne bent over them, and read on one:

“LAST FIGHTING. REDUCTION OF THE CENTRAL DERVISH CITY. REMARKABLE, ETC.”

On the other he read:

“LAST SMALL REPUBLIC ANNEXED. NICARAGUAN CAPITAL SURRENDERS AFTER A MONTH’S FIGHTING. GREAT SLAUGHTER.”

Wayne bent over them again, evidently puzzled; then he looked at the dates. They were both dated in August fifteen years before.

“Why do you keep these old things?” he said, startled entirely out of his absurd tact of mysticism. “Why do you hang them outside your shop?”

“Because,” said the other simply, “they are the records of the last war. You mentioned war just now. It happens to be my hobby.”

Wayne lifted his large blue eyes with an infantile wonder.

“Come with me,” said Turnbull, shortly, and led him into a parlour at the back of the shop.

In the centre of the parlour stood a large deal table. On it were set rows and rows of the tin and lead soldiers which were part of the shopkeeper’s stock. The visitor would have thought nothing of it if it had not been for a certain odd grouping of them, which did not seem either entirely commercial or entirely haphazard.

“You are acquainted, no doubt,” said Turnbull, turning his big eyes upon Wayne “you are acquainted, no doubt, with the arrangement of the American and Nicaraguan troops in the last battle.” And he waved his hand towards the table.

“I am afraid not,” said Wayne. “I...”

“Ah, you were at that time occupied too much, perhaps with the Dervish affair. You will find it in this corner.” And he pointed to a part of the floor where there was another arrangement of children’s soldiers grouped here and there.

“You seem,” said Wayne, “to be interested in military matters.”

“I am interested in nothing else,” answered the toy-shop keeper, simply.

Wayne appeared convulsed with a singular, suppressed excitement.

“In that case,” he said, “I may approach you with an unusual degree of confidence. Touching the matter of the defence of Notting Hill, I...”

“Defence of Notting Hill? Yes, sir. This way, sir,” said Turnbull, with great perturbation. “Just step into this side room;” and he led Wayne into another apartment, in which the table was entirely covered with an arrangement of children’s bricks. A second glance at it told Wayne that the bricks were arranged in the form of a precise and perfect plan of Notting Hill. “Sir,” said Turnbull, impressively, “you have, by a kind of accident, hit upon the whole secret of my life. As a boy, I grew up among the last wars of the world, when Nicaragua was taken and the dervishes wiped out. And I adopted it as a hobby, sir, as you might adopt astronomy or bird-stuffing. I had no ill-will to any one, but I was interested in war as a science, as a game. And suddenly I was bowled out. The big Powers of the world, having swallowed up all the small ones, came to that confounded agreement, and there was no more war. There was nothing more for me to do but to do what I do now...to read the old campaigns in dirty old newspapers, and to work them out with tin soldiers. One other thing had occurred to me. I thought it an amusing fancy to make a plan of how this district of ours ought to be defended if it were ever attacked. It seems to interest you too.”