The Two Undertakers

I EMPTIED my stein, called for another and looked once more into the Platzl, The morning was warm and fine ; the season was late September, the 27th to be exact; and the air gave promise that St. Martin would not be cheated of his summer. Dust, chased in spirals by a light breeze, was dancing down the street and Munich was pleasant to look upon.

I was sitting in one of the arched windows of the Hofbrauhaus, in whose dark halls men had grasped beer-pots, and drunk and swore, and quarrelled and sung Lieder for four hundred years.

I had been at my table for some twenty minutes lookig through the local papers. Several farther bankruptcies were recorded ; the number of young men in the big cities who had never had any work to do and were unlikely ever to find their way to an office or factory, was steadily increasing― European statesmanship appeared to be as bankrupt as the private financiers who were shooting themselves daily. Finally, there had been another of the appalling accidents which had recently become so alarmingly frequent in the German public services, and it was openly suggested in more than one of the sheets at which I had looked that they must be the work of an organised gang of wreckers. For no apparent reason a big passenger plane flying from Munich to Berlin had crashed shortly after taking off from the aerodrome, and six passengers and the two pilots had been killed outright,