Note 57 — VII

A few months after this, in the course of a little controversy in the Saturday Review (which arose from an unsigned and, I hoped, rather reasonable article of mine on the Adriatic Settlement) I quoted from memory this passage of Mrs. Re-Bartlett's and said that the Italian captain was giving chocolates to the children at Kievo. Thereupon Mr. Harold W. E. Goad of the British-Italian League wrote a highly indignant letter to the editor, and in the course of it he denounced me for having egregiously invented the chocolates "for the sole purpose of throwing her testimony into ridicule.... What do you, Sir, think of such methods as that?" And he concluded by declaring that I wallowed in a "truly Balkan slough of distortion and calumny." Well, on referring to Mrs. Re-Bartlett's article I find that there is no mention of chocolates, and I apologize; presumably the children were crowding round their adored Capitano in order to thank him for the bridges and waterworks which were being built in Dalmatia.