education. It should have been easy to demonstrate that my learning
was on altogether another plane to his, but in my nervousness I
bungled miserably over test after test that was put to me. The
little French I had ever known deserted me; I could not render a
simple phrase about the gooseberry of the gardener into that
language, because I had forgotten the French for gooseberry."

The Chaplain again wriggled uneasily in his seat. "And then,"
resumed the condemned, "came the final discomfiture. In our village
we had a modest little debating club, and I remembered having
promised, chiefly, I suppose, to please and impress the doctor's
wife, to give a sketchy kind of lecture on the Balkan Crisis. I had
relied on being able to get up my facts from one or two standard
works, and the back-numbers of certain periodicals. The prosecution
had made a careful note of the circumstance that the man whom I
claimed to be--and actually was--had posed locally as some sort of
second-hand authority on Balkan affairs, and, in the midst of a
string of questions on indifferent topics, the examining counsel
asked me with a diabolical suddenness if I could tell the Court the
whereabouts of Novibazar. I felt the question to be a crucial one;
something told me that the answer was St. Petersburg or Baker
Street. I hesitated, looked helplessly round at the sea of tensely
expectant faces, pulled myself together, and chose Baker Street.
And then I knew that everything was lost. The prosecution had no
difficulty in demonstrating that an individual, even moderately
versed in the affairs of the Near East, could never have so
unceremoniously dislocated Novibazar from its accustomed corner of
the map. It was an answer which the Salvation Army captain might
conceivably have made--and I made it. The circumstantial evidence
connecting the Salvationist with the crime was overwhelmingly