the young Hector Munro was educated at Pencarwick School in Exmouth and then as a boarder at Bedford School. In 1887, after his retirement, his father returned from Burma and embarked upon a series of European travels with Hector and his siblings. Hector followed his father in 1893 into the Indian Imperial Police and was posted to Burma, but successive bouts of fever caused his return home after only fifteen months. Writing career In 1896 he decided to move to London to make a living as a writer. Munro started his writing career as a journalist for newspapers such as The Westminster Gazette, the Daily Express, The Morning Post, and magazines such as the Bystander and Outlook. His first book, The Rise of the Russian Empire, a historical study modelled upon Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, appeared in 1900, under his real name, but proved to be something of a false start. While writing The Rise of the Russian Empire, he made his first foray into short story writing and published a piece called "Dogged" in St Paul's on February 18, 1899. (Munro's sketch "The Achievement of the Cat" appeared the day before in The Westminster Budget.) He then moved into the world of political satire in 1900 with a collaboration with Francis Carruthers Gould entitled "Alice in Westminster". Gould produced the sketches, and Munro wrote the text accompanying them, using the pen name "Saki" for the first time. The series lampooned political figures of the day (Alice in Downing Street begins with the memorable line, "'Have you ever seen an Ineptitude?'" – referring to a zoomorphised Arthur Balfour), and was published in the Liberal Westminster Gazette. In 1902 he moved to The Morning Post, described as one of the "organs of intransigence" by Stephen Koss, to work as a foreign correspondent, first in the Balkans, and then in Russia, where he was witness to the 1905 revolution in St. Petersburg. He then went on to Paris, before returning to London in 1908, where "the agreeable life of a man of letters with a brilliant reputation awaited him". In the intervening period Reginald had been published in 1904, the stories having first appeared in The Westminster Gazette, and all this time he was writing sketches for The Morning Post, the Bystander and The Westminster Gazette. He kept a place in Mortimer Street, wrote, played bridge