STARTING POINT. In “The Bird of Serbia,” Mr. Street desired to say
through the medium of fiction a certain thing. “Perhaps I wanted to
say: ‘Nothing is so small or so nasty that it can not be made to serve
an autocratic ruler in carrying out his designs.’ So, then, I took as
my symbol for smallness and nastiness, the louse. And then I set out to
prove that lice could serve the autocrat who wished to start a war. I
wanted to show how very true that theory is, and I should say that the
quality of truth in that story--the convincingness of it--is the best
thing about it.”--_Julian Street._