英语小说网

"Now, let me see," he whined with studious deliberation, "what he gives on this." He fumbled for the notes.

With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his torso from loin to chin.

"Entgegen," said Eugene, in a small choked voice, "follows its object."

Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the window, a low sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips.

"I'm not so sure of that," he said.

Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand stroking his grave pallid face.

John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head, still searching the notes.

Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds. Tom Davis hurled himself violently downward over his desk. John Dorsey looked up, adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth.

From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught him a little German, a language of which he had been quite happily ignorant. The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked it over with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation in order to enjoy his bewilderment. Sometimes, deliberately, they salted their pages with glib false readings, sometimes they interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting exultantly for his cautious amendment of a word that did not exist.

Before I bust you on the ear."

"Let me see," said John Dorsey, turning the pages, "what he gives on this."

Tom Davis thrust a mouthful of strange gurgling noises into his desk, and waited for the classic evasion. It came at once.

"Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in which the old man was sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and finally,"-- Guy Doak looked up slyly at his tutor, "giving him a good punch in the eye."

Guy Doak scrawled a brief message across a crumpled wad and thrust it on Eugene's desk. Eugene read:

"Du bist wie eine bum-me."

"Gebe mir ein Stuck Papier,

"No-o," said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin, "not exactly. 'Catching him squarely in the eye' gets the idiom better, I think."

He detached two slick sheets from his tablet, and wrote in answer:

They read sweet gluey little stories, fat German tear-gulps: Immensee, Höher als die Kirche, Der Zerbrochene Krug. Then, Wilhelm Tell. The fine lyrical measure of the opening song, the unearthly siren song to the fisher-boy, haunted them with its faery music. The heavy melodrama of some of the scenes was unhackneyed to them: they bent eagerly to the apple-shooting scene, and the escape by boat. As for the rest, it was, they wearily recognized, Great Literature. Mr. Schiller, they saw, was religiously impressed, like Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Paul Revere, with the beauties of Liberty. His embattled Swiss bounded ponderously from crag to crag, invoking it in windy speeches.

"The mountains," observed John Dorsey, touched, in a happy moment, by the genius of the place, "have been the traditional seat of Liberty."

Guy Doak had a trim cocky figure of medium height, black hair, bright dark eyes, a pale, very smooth oval face, somehow suggestive, Eugene thought, of a fish's belly, with somewhat unhappily full jaws which made his lower features seem larger than his upper. He was foppishly neat in his dress. People called him a good-looking boy.

Eugene turned his face toward the western ranges. He heard, far off, a whistle, a remote, thunder on the rails.

During this season of Eliza's absence he roomed with Guy Doak.

He made few friends. To the boys at Leonard's this Yankee was far more remote than the rich Cuban boy, Manuel Quevado, whose fat dark laughter and broken speech was all for girls. He belonged to a richer South, but they knew him.

Guy Doak was five years his senior. He was a native of Newark, New Jersey: his speech was touched with Yankee nasality, his manner with Yankee crispness. His mother, a boarding-house mistress, had come to Altamont a year or two before to retrieve her health: she was tubercular, and spent part of the winter in Florida.

Outside of this, Guy Doak was a very nice fellow -- sharp, obstinate, unsubtle, and pleased with his wit. They lived on the first floor at Leonard's: at night, by a roaring wood fire, they listened carefully to the great thunder of the trees, and to the stealthy creaking foot-steps of the master as he came softly down the stairs, and paused by their door. They ate at table with Margaret, John Dorsey, Miss Amy, the two children, John Dorsey, junior, nine, and Margaret, five, and two of Leonard's Tennessee nephews -- Tyson Leonard, a ferret-faced boy of eighteen, foulmouthed and sly, and Dirk Barnard, a tall slender boy, seventeen, with a bumpy face, brown merry eyes, and a quick temper. At table they kept up a secret correspondence of innuendo and hidden movement, fleshing a fork in a grunting neighbor as John Dorsey said the blessing, and choking with smothered laughter. At night, they tapped messages on floor and ceiling, crept out for sniggering conventions in the windy dark hall, and fled to their innocent beds as John Dorsey stormed down on them.

Guy Doak had none of their floridity. He was lacking in their hearty violence. He did not laugh loudly. He had a sharp, bright, shallow mind, inflexibly dogmatic. His companions were bad Southern romantics, he was a false Yankee realist. They arrived, thus, by different means, at a common goal of superstition. Guy Doak had already hardened into the American city-dweller's mould of infantile cynicism. He was occasionally merry with the other boys in the classic manner of the city fellow with the yokels. He was wise. Above all, he was wise. It was safe to assume, he felt, that Truth was always on the scaffold, and Wrong forever on the throne. So far from being depressed by the slaughter of the innocents, the spectacle gave him much bitter amusement.

Leonard was fighting hard to keep his little school alive. He had less than twenty students the first year, and less than thirty the second. From an income of not more than $3,000 he had to pay Miss Amy, who had left a high school position to help him, a small salary. The old house on its fine wooded hill was full of outmoded plumbing and drafty corridors: he had leased it at a small rental. But the rough usage of thirty boys demanded a considerable yearly restoration. The Leonards were fighting very stubbornly and courageously for their existence.

The food was scant and poor: at breakfast, a dish of blue, watery oatmeal, eggs and toast; at lunch, a thin soup, hot sour cornbread, and a vegetable boiled with a piece of fat pork; at dinner, hot biscuits, a small meat loaf, and creamed or boiled potatoes. No one was permitted coffee or tea, but there was an abundance of fresh creamy milk. John Dorsey always kept and milked his own cow. Occasionally there was a deep, crusted pie, hot, yolky muffins, or spicy gingerbread of Margaret's make. She was a splendid cook.

Often, at night, Guy Doak slid quietly out through the window on to the side porch, and escaped down the road under the concealing roar of the trees. He would return from town within two hours, crawling in exultantly with a bag full of hot frankfurter sandwiches coated thickly with mustard, chopped onion, and a hot Mexican sauce. With a crafty grin he unfoiled two five-cent cigars, which they smoked magnificently, with a sharp tang of daring, blowing the smoke up the chimney in order to thwart a possible irruption by the master. And Guy brought back, from the wind and the night, the good salt breath of gossip in street and store, news of the town, and the brave swagger of the drugstore gallants.

As they smoked and stuffed fat palatable bites of sandwich into their mouths, they would regard each other with pleased sniggers, carrying on thus an insane symphony of laughter:

"Chuckle, chuckle! -- laugh of gloatation."

"Tee-hee, tee-hee, tee-hee!… laugh of titterosity."

"Snuh-huh, snuh-huh, snuh-huh!… laugh of gluttonotiousness."

The vigorous warmth of burning wood filled their room pleasantly: over their sheltered heads the dark gigantic wind howled through the earth. O sheltered love, nooked warmly in against this winter night. O warm fair women, whether within a forest hut, or by the town ledged high above the moaning seas, shot upon the wind, I come.

"Now let me see," he whined, "what he gives on this."

Their laughter rang around the walls. Too late, they heard the aroused stealthy foot-falls of the master, creaking down the hall. Later -- silence, the dark, the wind.

Miss Amy closed her small beautifully kept grade book, thrust her great arms upward, and yawned. Eugene looked hopefully at her and out along the playing court, reddened by the late sun. He was wild, uncontrollable, erratic. His mad tongue leaped out in class. He could never keep peace a full day. He amazed them. They loved him, and they punished him piously, affectionately. He was never released at the dismissal hour. He was always "kept in."

Guy Doak toyed gently at his belly with his right hand, and stroked his round chin slowly with his left.

John Dorsey noted each whisper of disorder, or each failure in preparation, by careful markings in a book. Each afternoon he read the names of delinquents, amid a low mutter of sullen protest, and stated their penalties. Once Eugene got through an entire day without a mark. He stood triumphantly before Leonard while the master searched the record.

"Go on!" she said, in her broad, lazy accent. "I don't want to fool with you any more. You're not worth powder enough to blow you up."

Margaret came in, her face furrowed deeply between smoke-dark eyes, full of tender sternness and hidden laughter.

He bent to a long dribbling suction of laughter. Eugene's wild eyes were shot with tears of anger and surprise. He never forgot.

"Well, sir!" he said. "There must be a mistake. I'm going to keep you in on general principles."

Miss Amy yawned, and smiled on him with slow powerful affectionate contempt.

"What's wrong with the rascal?" she asked. "Can't he learn algebra?"

John Dorsey began to laugh foolishly; he gripped his hand affectionately around the boy's arm.

"I'd like to warm you a bit with this," she laughed, slowly and richly. "You'd learn then."

"He can learn!" drawled Miss Amy. "He can learn anything. He's lazy -- that's what it is. Just plain lazy."

She smacked his buttock smartly with a ruler.

Miss Amy turned her handsome gypsy eyes on Eugene.

"Go on. I've seen enough of you." She made a strong weary gesture of dismissal.

Hatless, with a mad whoop, he plunged through the door and leaped the porch rail.

"Here!" said Margaret, shaking her head in protest. "You leave that boy alone. Don't look behind the faun's ears. Never mind about algebra, here. That's for poor folks. There's no need for algebra where two and two make five."

Grinning, he galloped back, picked up a limp rag of dirty green felt, and pulled it over his chaotic hair. Curly tufts stuck through the gaping crease-holes.

"Come here!" said Margaret gravely. Her nervous fingers pulled his frayed necktie around to the front, tugged down his vest, and buttoned his coat over tightly, while he peered at her with his strange devil's grin. Suddenly she trembled with laughter.

"Here, boy!" Margaret called. "Where's your hat?"

A light wind of April fanned over the hill. There was a smell of burning leaves and rubble around the school. In the field on the hill flank behind the house a plowman drove his big horse with loose clanking traces around a lessening square of dry fallow earth. Gee, woa. His strong feet followed after. The big share bit cleanly down, cleaving a deep spermy furrow of moist young earth along its track.

"You want to fix yourself up, 'Gene," she said, "so the girls will begin to notice you."

He heard the strange song of Margaret's laughter.

"Leave him alone!" she whispered to no one. "Leave him alone!"

Miss Amy smiled at him with indifferent sleepy cat-warmth.

"As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon lover."

He turned, and, crying fiercely in his throat, tore down the road with bounding strides.

His eyes burned on her face, flowing with dark secret beauty.

"Good heavens, Amy," she said. "Look at that hat."

"Can you see him out courting?" she said. "The poor girl would think she had a demon lover, sure."

All the dusk blurred in her eyes.

"Get along, you scamp!" she ordered.

Down the road a straggling queue of boys were all gone into the world of light. Wet with honest sweat, the plowman paused at the turn, and wiped the blue shirting of his forearm across his beaded forehead. Meanwhile, his intelligent animal, taking advantage of the interval, lifted with slow majesty a proud flowing tail, and added his mite to the fertility of the soil with three moist oaty droppings. Watching, John Dorsey grunted approvingly. They also serve who only stand and wait.

"Please, Mr. Leonard," said Eugene, carefully choosing his moment, "can I go?"

John Dorsey Leonard stroked his chin absently, and stared sightlessly at his book. Others abide our question, thou art free.

John Dorsey Leonard stared fascinated out the window at the annual rejuvenation of the earth. Before his eyes the emergent nymph was scaling her hard cracked hag's pelt. The golden age returned.

"Huh?" he purred vaguely. Then, with a high vacant snigger he turned suddenly, and said:

"You rascal, you! See if Mrs. Leonard wants you." He fastened his brutal grip with keen hunger into the boy's thin arm. April is the cruellest of months. Eugene winced, moved away, and then stood quietly, checked by memory of the old revolt from awe.

"Mr. Leonard says to ask you if I can go?" he said.

He found Margaret in the library reading to the children from The Water Babies.

"Yes, you scamp. Go on," she said. "Tell me, boy," she coaxed, softly, "can't you be a little bit better?"

"Yes'm," he promised, easily. "I'll try." Say not the struggle naught availeth.

And her eyes were darkened wholly.

She smiled at his high mettled prancing nervousness.

He bounded away from the nunnery of the chaste breast and quiet mind.

As he leaped down the stairs into the yard he heard Dirk Barnard's lusty splashing bathtub solo. Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. Tyson Leonard, having raked into every slut's corner of nature with a thin satisfied grin, emerged from the barn with a cap full of fresh eggs. A stammering cackle of protest followed him from angry hens who found too late that men betray. At the barnside, under the carriage shed, "Pap" Rheinhart tightened the bellyband of his saddled brown mare, swinging strongly into the saddle, and with a hard scramble of hoofs, came up the hill, wheeled in behind the house, and drew up by Eugene.

"In hell they'll roast thee like a herrin'," she said gently. "Get out of here."

"Jump on, 'Gene," he invited, patting the mare's broad rump. "I'll take you home."

"Dog-trot your granny," said Eugene. "You tried to kill me."

"Pap" boomed with laughter.

Eugene looked up at him grinning.

"Why, pshaw, boy!" he said. "That was nothing but a gentle little dog-trot."

"You'll take me nowhere," he said. "I couldn't sit down for a week last time."

"Much obliged, Pap," said Eugene ironically. "But I'm thinking of using my tail a good deal in my old age. I don't want to wear it out while I'm young."

"Pap" Rheinhart turned his wry neck down on the boy with grave dry humor.

"Come on," he said gruffly. "I'm not going to hurt you. I'll teach you how to ride a horse."

Pleased with them both, "Pap" Rheinhart laughed loud and deep, spat a brown quid back over the horse's crupper, and, digging his heels in smartly, galloped away around the house, into the road. The horse bent furiously to his work, like a bounding dog. With four-hooved thunder he drummed upon the sounding earth. Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.

"J. D. had to do his spring plowing," said Eugene.

"Hey!" With high bounding exultancy Eugene came down the road to join them. Without turning, stolid Van Yeats threw up his hand impatiently and greeted the unseen with a cheer. The others turned, welcoming him with ironical congratulation.

At the two-posted entry, by the bishop's boundary, the departing students turned, split quickly to the sides, and urged the horseman on with shrill cries. "Pap" bent low, with loose-reined hands above the horse-mane, went through the gate like the whiz of a cross-bow. Then, he jerked the mare back on her haunches with a dusty skid of hoofs, and waited for the boys to come up.

"'Highpockets,'" said "Doc" Hines, comically puckering his small tough face, "how'd you happen to git out on time?" He had an affected, high-pitched nigger drawl. When he spoke he kept one hand in his coat pocket, fingering a leather thong loaded with buckshot.

"Well, if it ain't ole Handsome," said Julius Arthur. He grinned squintily, revealing a mouthful of stained teeth screwed in a wire clamp. His face was covered with small yellow pustulate sores. How begot, how nourished?

At the corner of Church Street, across from the new imitation Tudor of the Episcopal church, they paused. Above them, on the hill, rose the steeples of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches. Ye antique spires, ye distant towers!

"You going home, Villa?"

"Want one, Highpockets?" he asked Eugene, grinning.

"Who's going my way?" said Julius Arthur. "Come on, 'Gene. The car's down here. I'll take you home."

"Thanks, but I can't," said Eugene. "I'm going up-town." Their curious eyes on Dixieland when I get out.

"Want a chew, Jule?" he said.

"Shall we sing our little song for Handsome Hal?" said Ralph Rolls to his copesmate Julius. He wore a derby hat jammed over his pert freckled face. As he spoke he took a ragged twist of tobacco from his pocket and bit off a large chew with a rough air of relish.

He brought me roots of relish sweet.

Julius took the twist, wiped off his mouth with a loose male grin, and crammed a large quid into his cheek.

"No," said George Graves.

"Well, keep Hal out of trouble," said Ralph Rolls.

"So long, boys."

"Don't let 'em climb your frame, son," said Van Yeats, turning his quiet pleasant face on Eugene. "If you need help, let me know."

"So long."

"Yes," said Eugene, still brooding on Dixieland and his clumsy deceptions.

They crossed the street, mixing in nimble horse-play, and turned down past the church along a sloping street that led to the garages. George Graves and Eugene continued up the hill.

Julius Arthur laughed roughly and thrust his hand through Eugene's hair. "Old Hairbreadth Hal," he said. "The cutthroat from Saw-Tooth Gap!"

"Julius is a good boy," said George Graves. "His father makes more money than any other lawyer in town."

A street-sweeper walked along slowly uphill, beside his deep wedge-bodied cart. From time to time he stopped the big slow-footed horse and, sweeping the littered droppings of street and gutter into a pan, with a long-handled brush, dumped his collections into the cart. Let not Ambition mock their useful toil.

Three sparrows hopped deftly about three fresh smoking globes of horse-dung, pecking out tidbits with dainty gourmandism. Driven away by the approaching cart, they skimmed briskly over to the bank, with bright twitters of annoyance. One too like thee, tameless, and swift, and proud.

George Graves turned to him with a sombre, puzzled smile. "What's the matter?" he asked.

Eugene thought seriously for a moment. With George Graves, it was necessary to resume a discussion where it had been left off three days before.

"No -- three thousand, three thousand!" he said, in a choking voice.

Most musical of mourners, weep again!

From the top of the hill at the left, the swelling unction of the Methodist organ welled up remotely from the choir, accompanied by a fruity contralto voice, much in demand at funerals. Abide with me.

"Not over $2,500, anyway," said George Graves gloomily.

George Graves turned and examined the four large black houses, ascending on flat terraces to the church, of Paston Place.

"Who?" he said, "John Dorsey? Yes, I think he does," he added, grinning.

"O you fool! You damn fool!" gasped Eugene. "You've been thinking about it all this time."

George Graves laughed sheepishly, with embarrassment, richly.

"Say, 'Gene!" he said finally. "I don't believe he makes that much."

George Graves ascended the hill with a slow ponderous rhythm, staring darkly at the ground.

"It will all go to Gil Paston some day," said George Graves with virtuous regret. "He's not worth a damn."

"That's a good piece of property, 'Gene," he said. "It belongs to the Paston estate."

Fast falls the even-tide. Heaves the proud harlot her distended breast, in intricacies of laborious song.

A negro dug tenderly in the round loamy flowerbeds of the Presbyterian churchyard, bending now and then to thrust his thick fingers gently in about the roots. The old church, with its sharp steeple, rotted slowly, decently, prosperously, like a good man's life, down into its wet lichened brick. Eugene looked gratefully, with a second's pride, at its dark decorum, its solid Scotch breeding.

"To hell with these Methodists!" Eugene said with an elegant, disdainful face. "They're too damn common for us." God in three persons -- blessed Trinity. "Brother Graves," he continued, in a fat well-oiled voice, "I didn't see you at prayer-meeting Wednesday night. Where in Jesus' name were you?"

"I'm a Presbyterian," he said. "What are you?"

They had reached the top of the hill. Church Street ended levelly a block beyond, in the narrow gulch of the avenue. They saw, with quickened pulse, the little pullulation of the town.

"An Episcopalian, when I go," said George Graves with irreverent laughter.

With his open palm he struck George Graves violently between his meaty shoulders. George Graves staggered drunkenly with high resounding laughter.

"Why, Brother Gant," said he, "I had a little appointment with one of the Good Sisters, out in the cow-shed."

There was a hot blast of steamy air from the Appalachian Laundry across the street and, as the door from the office of the washroom opened, they had a moment's glimpse of negresses plunging their wet arms into the liquefaction of their clothes.

Eugene gathered a telephone pole into his wild embrace, and threw one leg erotically over its second foot-wedge. George Graves leaned his heavy shoulder against it, his great limbs drained with laughter.

"We oughtn't to talk like that, 'Gene," said George Graves reproachfully. "Sure enough! It's not right."

He became moodily serious rapidly. "The best people in this town are church members," he said earnestly. "It's a fine thing."

George Graves dried his eyes. Laughing wearily, they crossed over.

"Why?" said Eugene, with an idle curiosity.

"Because," said George Graves, "you get to know all the people who are worth a damn."

Worth being damned, he thought quickly. A quaint idea.

"Yes," Eugene agreed seriously, "you're right." To walk together to the kirk, with a goodly company.

"It helps you in a business way. They come to know you and respect you. You won't get far in this town, 'Gene, without them. It pays," he added devoutly, "to be a Christian."

He thought sadly of his lost sobriety, and of how once, lonely, he had walked the decent lanes of God's Scotch town. Unbidden they came again to haunt his memory, the shaven faces of good tradesmen, each leading the well washed kingdom of his home in its obedient ritual the lean hushed smiles of worship, the chained passion of devotion, as they implored God's love upon their ventures, or delivered their virgin daughters into the holy barter of marriage. And from even deeper adyts of his brain there swam up slowly to the shores of his old hunger the great fish whose names he scarcely knew -- whose names, garnered with blind toil from a thousand books, from Augustine, himself a name, to Jeremy Taylor, the English metaphysician, were brief evocations of scalded light, electric, phosphorescent, illuminating by their magic connotations the vast far depths of ritual and religion: They came -- Bartholomew, Hilarius, Chrysostomos, Polycarp, Anthony, Jerome, and the forty martyrs of Cappadocia who walked the waves -- coiled like their own green shadows for a moment, and were gone.

"Besides," said George Graves, "a man ought to go anyway. Honesty's the best policy."

"Do you feel that?" he said tenderly.

"Wrogd gdo gurk!"

"I suppose," said George Graves thoughtfully, "the gold they use in people's teeth is worth a lot of money."

Across the street, on the second floor of a small brick three-story building that housed several members of the legal, medical, surgical, and dental professions, Dr. H. M. Smathers pumped vigorously with his right foot, took a wad of cotton from his assistant, Miss Lola Bruce, and thrusting it securely into the jaw of the unseen patient, bent his fashionable bald head intently. A tiny breeze blew back the thin curtains, and revealed him, white-jacketed, competent, drill in hand.

"Spit!" With thee conversing, I forget all time.

"Yes," said Eugene, finding the idea attractive, "if only one person in ten has gold fillings that would be ten million in the United States alone. You can figure on five dollars' worth each, can't you?"

"Easy!" said George Graves. "More than that." He brooded lusciously a moment. "That's a lot of money," he said.

"What's the matter?" cried George Graves.

Eugene's eyes were glued on the lantern face of "Horse" Hines. He beat the air with a convulsive arm, and sank his fingers in his throat.

In the office of the Rogers-Malone Undertaking Establishment the painful family of death was assembled, "Horse" Hines, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his feet thrust out on the broad window-ledge, chatted lazily with Mr. C. M. Powell, the suave silent partner. How sleep the brave, who sink to rest. Forget not yet.

"They shall not bury me alive," he said.

"There's good money in undertaking," said George Graves. "Mr. Powell's well off."

"You can't tell," George Graves said gloomily. "It's been known to happen. They've dug them up later and found them turned over on their faces."

Eugene shuddered. "I think," he suggested painfully, "they're supposed to take out your insides when they embalm you."

"Yes," said George Graves more hopefully, "and that stuff they use would kill you anyway. They pump you full of it."

With shrunken heart, Eugene considered. The ghost of old fear, that had been laid for years, walked forth to haunt him.

Fascinated, they stared through screen-doors down the dark central corridor, flanked by jars of weeping ferns. A sweet funereal odor of carnations and cedar-wood floated on the cool heavy air. Dimly, beyond a central partition, they saw a heavy casket, on a wheeled trestle, with rich silver handles and velvet coverings. The thick light faded there in dark.

In his old fantasies of death he had watched his living burial, had foreseen his waking life-indeath, his slow, frustrated efforts to push away the smothering flood of earth until, as a drowning swimmer claws the air, his mute and stiffened fingers thrust from the ground a call for hands.

"They're laid out in the room behind," said George Graves, lowering his voice.

At this moment, having given to misery all he had (a tear), the very Reverend Father James O'Haley, S. J., among the faithless faithful only he, unshaken, unseduced, unterrified, emerged plumply from the chapel, walked up the soft aisle rug with brisk short-legged strides, and came out into the light. His pale blue eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, his plump uncreased face set firmly in a smile of quiet benevolence; he covered himself with a small well-kept hat of black velvet, and set off toward the avenue. Eugene shrank back gently as the little man walked past him: that small priestly figure in black bore on him the awful accolade of his great Mistress, that smooth face had heard the unutterable, seen the unknowable. In this remote outpost of the mighty Church, he was the standard-bearer of the one true faith, the consecrate flesh of God.

To rot away into a flower, to melt into a tree with the friendless bodies of unburied men.

"A beer-bottle rampant on a field of limburger cheese, gules," said Eugene.

"They're trying to get the Princess Madeleine into Society," said George Graves.

"They get all that's coming to them. He doesn't seem to be starving, does he?"

"Don't let them hear you," said George Graves, with a surly laugh. "They've got a family tree and a coat of arms already."

"Mr. Eugene Gant was the host last night at a hot wienie roast given to members of the local Younger Set at Dixieland, the beautiful old ancestral mansion of his mother, Mrs. Eliza Gant."

"How do they live, then?" Eugene asked.

"They don't get any pay," said George Graves sorrowfully.

"He lives on the fat of the land," said George Graves. "Wine at every meal. There are some rich Catholics in this town."

"Don't you worry!" said George Graves, with a knowing smile.

"No," said Eugene, "he doesn't."

"Hell fire!" Eugene cried, grinning. "Let's let her in, if that's all she wants. We belong to the Younger Set, don't we?"

"You may," said George Graves, reeling with laughter, "but I don't. I wouldn't be caught dead with the little pimps."

"Yes," said Eugene. "Frank Moriarty's got a pot full of money that he made selling licker."

"During the course of the evening, the Honorable George Graves, the talented scion of one of our oldest and wealthiest families, the Chesterfield Graveses, ($10 a week and up), rendered a few appropriate selections on the jews-harp."

George Graves staggered. "You oughtn't to say that, 'Gene," he gasped. He shook his head reproachfully. "Your mother's a fine woman."

Pausing deliberately, George Graves wiped his streaming eyes, and blew his nose. In the windows of Bain's millinery store, a waxen nymph bore a confection of rakish plumes upon her false tresses, and extended her simpering fingers in elegant counterpoise. Hats For Milady. O that those lips had language.

At this moment, with a smooth friction of trotting rumps, the death-wagon of Rogers-Malone turned swiftly in from the avenue, and wheeled by on ringing hoofs. They turned curiously and watched it draw up to the curb.

"Another Redskin bit the dust," said George Graves.

"Horse" Hines came out quickly on long flapping legs, and opened the doors behind. In another moment, with the help of the two men on the driver's seat, he had lowered the long wicker basket gently, and vanished, quietly, gravely, into the fragrant gloom of his establishment.

He caught and fixed the instant. A telegraph messenger wheeled vigorously in from the avenue with pumping feet, curved widely into the alley at his right, jerking his wheel up sharply as he took the curb and coasted down to the delivery boy's entrance. And post o'er land and ocean without rest. Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

As Eugene watched, the old fatality of place returned. Each day, he thought, we pass the spot where some day we must die; or shall I, too, ride dead to some mean building yet unknown? Shall this bright clay, the hill-bound, die in lodgings yet unbuilt? Shall these eyes, drenched with visions yet unseen, stored with the viscous and interminable seas at dawn, with the sad comfort of unfulfilled Arcadias, seal up their cold dead dreams upon a tick, as this, in time, in some hot village of the plains?

Descending the dark stairs of the Medical Building slowly, Mrs. Thomas Hewitt, the comely wife of the prominent attorney (of Arthur, Hewitt, and Grey), turned out into the light, and advanced slowly toward the avenue. She was greeted with flourishing gestures of the hat by Henry T. Merriman (Merriman and Merriman), and Judge Robert C. Allan, professional colleagues of her husband. She smiled and shot each quickly with a glance. Pleasant is this flesh. When she had passed they looked after her a moment. Then they continued their discussion of the courts.

On the third floor of the First National Bank building on the right hand corner, Fergus Paston, fifty-six, a thin lecherous mouth between iron-gray dundrearies, leaned his cocked leg upon his open window, and followed the movements of Miss Bernie Powers, twenty-two, crossing the street. Even in our ashes live their wonted fires.

"What does she do?" said Eugene.

On the opposite corner, Mrs. Roland Rawls, whose husband was manager of the Peerless Pulp Company (Plant No. 3), and whose father owned it, emerged from the rich seclusion of Arthur N. Wright, jeweller. She clasped her silver mesh-bag and stepped into her attendant Packard. She was a tall black-haired woman of thirty-three with a good figure: her face was dull, flat, and Mid-western.

"She's the one with the money," said George Graves. "He hasn't a damn thing. It's all in her name. She wants to be an opera singer."

"Can she sing?"

"Not worth a damn," said George Graves. "I've heard her. There's your chance, 'Gene. She's got a daughter about your age."

"You have to work too damn hard for your money," said Eugene.

"She wants to be an actress," said George Graves, laughing throatily.

It was too late for escape.

They had reached the corner by the Bank, and now halted, indecisively, looking up the cool gulch of afternoon. The street buzzed with a light gay swarm of idlers: the faces of the virgins bloomed in and out like petals on a bough. Advancing upon him, an inch to the second, Eugene saw, ten feet away, the heavy paralyzed body of old Mr. Avery. He was a very great scholar, stone-deaf, and seventy-eight years old. He lived alone in a room above the Public Library. He had neither friends nor connections. He was a myth.

Gasping a welcome, Mr. Avery bore down on him, with a violent shuffle of his feet and a palsied tattoo of his heavy stick which brought him over the intervening three yards in forty seconds.

"Well, young fellow," he panted, "how's Latin?"

"Oh, my God!" said Eugene. "Here he comes!"

"Fine," Eugene screamed into his pink ear.

"Poeta nascitur, non fit," said Mr. Avery, and went off into a silent wheeze of laughter which brought on a fit of coughing strangulation. His eyes bulged, his tender pink skin grew crimson, he roared his terror out in a phlegmy rattle, while his goose-white hand trembled frantically for his handkerchief. A crowd gathered. Eugene quickly drew a dirty handkerchief from the old man's pocket, and thrust it into his hands. He tore up from his convulsed organs a rotting mass, and panted rapidly for breath. The crowd dispersed somewhat dejectedly.

Quivering with tremors of laughter, he launched himself again. Because he could not leave them, save by the inch, they moved off several yards to the curb. Grow old along with me!

"Amo, amas, I love a lass. Amat, He loves her, too."

George Graves grinned darkly. "That's too bad," he said. "You oughtn't to laugh, 'Gene." He turned away, gurgling.

Not where he eats, but where he is eaten.

"Can you conjugate?" gasped Mr. Avery. "Here's the way I learned:"

At this moment, dodging briskly through the crowd, with a loud and cheerful word for every one, Mr. Joseph Bailey, secretary of the Altamont Chamber of Commerce, short, broad, and ruddy, came up by them with a hearty gesture of the hand:

"Does he go every day?" said George Graves, beginning to laugh.

"Three times a day," Eugene screamed. "He spends all morning going to dinner, and all afternoon going to supper."

"That's a damn shame," said George Graves, looking after him and shaking his head. "Where's he going?"

"To supper," said Eugene.

"To supper!" said George Graves. "It's only four o'clock. Where does he eat?"

"At the Uneeda," said Eugene, beginning to choke, "It takes him two hours to get there."

A whisper of laughter came from their weary jaws. They sighed like sedge.

Joseph, two yards away from legal safety, hurled himself with a wild scream headlong at the curb. He arrived on hands and knees, but under his own power.

"WHAT'S right?" said Eugene.

'Twas true! Dr. Fairfax Grinder's lean bristled upper lip drew back over his strong yellow teeth. He jammed on his brakes, and lifted his car round with a complete revolution of his long arms. Then he roared away through scattering traffic, in a greasy blue cloud of gasoline and burnt rubber.

"K-hurses!" said Eugene. "Foiled again."

But before George Graves could answer, the great lung specialist, Dr. Fairfax Grinder, scion of one of the oldest and proudest families in Virginia, drove in viciously from Church Street, with his sinewy length of six feet and eight inches coiled tensely in the deep pit of his big Buick roadster. Cursing generally the whole crawling itch of Confederate and Yankee postwar rabbledom, with a few special parentheses for Jews and niggers, he drove full tilt at the short plump figure of Joe Zamschnick, men's furnishings ("Just a Whisper Off The Square").

"Hello, boys!" he cried. "How're they going?" But before either of them could answer, he had passed on, with an encouraging shake of his head, and a deep applauding "THAT'S right."

Joe Zamschnick frantically wiped his gleaming bald head with a silk handkerchief and called loudly on the public to bear witness.

On the other side of the street, attracting no more than a languid stare from the loafing natives, the Honorable William Jennings Bryan paused benevolently before the windows of the H. Martin Grimes Bookstore, allowing the frisking breeze to toy pleasantly with his famous locks. The tangles of Neaera's hair.

"What's the matter with him?" said George Graves, disappointed. "He usually goes up on the sidewalk after them if he can't get them on the street."

"He may come here to live," said George Graves. "Dr. Doak's offered to give him a house and lot in Doak Park."

"Because the advertising will be worth a lot to the town," said George Graves.

The Commoner stared carefully at the window display which included several copies of Before Adam, by Jack London. Then he entered, and selected a dozen views of Altamont and the surrounding hills.

"Why?" said Eugene.

A little before them, that undaunted daughter of desires, Miss Elizabeth Scragg, emerged from Woolworth's Five and Ten Cent Store, and turned up toward the Square. Smiling, she acknowledged the ponderous salute of Big Jeff White, the giant half-owner of the Whitstone hotel, whose fortunes had begun when he had refused to return to his old comrade, Dickson Reese, the embezzling cashier, ninety thousand dollars of entrusted loot. Dog eat dog. Thief catch thief. It is not growing like a tree, in bulk doth make man better be.

Across the street again, before the windows of the Van W. Yeats Shoe Company, the Reverend J. Brooks Gall, Amherst ('61), and as loyal a Deke as ever breathed, but looking only sixty of his seventy-three years, paused in his brisk walk, and engaged in sprightly monologue, three of his fellow Boy Scouts -- the Messrs. Lewis Monk, seventeen, Bruce Rogers, thirteen, and Malcolm Hodges, fourteen. None knew as well as he the heart of a boy. He, too, it seems, had once been one himself. Thus, as one bright anecdote succeeded, or suggested, a half-dozen others, they smiled dutifully, with attentive respect, below the lifted barrier of his bristly white mustache, into the gleaming rhyme of his false teeth. And, with rough but affectionate camaraderie, he would pause from time to time to say: "Old Male!" or "Old Bruce!" gripping firmly his listener's arm, shaking him gently. Pallidly, on restless feet, they smiled, plotting escape with slant-eyed stealth.

His six-and-a-half-foot shadow flitted slowly before them. He passed, in creaking number twelves, a massive smooth-jowled man with a great paunch girdled in a wide belt.

In the Bijou Cafe for Ladies and Gents, Mike, the counter man, leaned his hairy arms upon the marble slab, and bent his wrinkled inch of brow upon a week-old copy of Atlantis. Fride Chicken To-day with Sweet Potatos. Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert. A solitary fly darted swiftly about the greasy cover of a glass humidor, under which a leathery quarter of mince pie lay weltering. Spring had come.

Meanwhile, having completed twice their parade up and down the street from the Square to the post-office, the Misses Christine Ball, Viola Powell, Aline Rollins, and Dorothy Hazzard were accosted outside Wood's Drug Store by Tom French, seventeen, Roy Duncan, nineteen, and Carl Jones, eighteen.

Mr. Buse, the Oriental rug merchant, came around the corner below them from Liberty Street. His broad dark face was wreathed in Persian smiles. I met a traveller from an antique land.

Gayly, brightly, in unison, they answered:

"Where do you think you're going?" said Tom French, insolently.

"Hey -- ee!"

"Hay's seven dollars a ton," said Roy Duncan, and immediately burst into a high cackle of laughter, in which all the others joined, merrily.

Mr. Henry Sorrell (It Can Be Done), and Mr. John T. Howland (We Sell Lots and Lots of Lots), emerged, beyond Arthur N. Wright's, jeweller, from the gloomy dusk of the Gruner Building. Each looked into the sub-divisions of the other's heart; their eyes kept the great Vision of the guarded mount as swiftly they turned into Church Street where Sorrell's Hudson was parked.

"Mr. Duncan," said Tom French, turning his proud ominous face upon his best friend, "I want you to meet a friend of mine, Miss Rollins."

"You craz-ee!" said Viola Powell tenderly. Tell me, ye merchants' daughters, did ye see another creature fair and wise as she.

"I think I've met this man somewhere before," said Aline Rollins. Another Splendor on his mouth alit.

His small tight freckled impish face creased again by his high cackle. All I could never be. They moved into the store, where drouthy neibors neibors meet, through the idling group of fountain gallants.

"Yes," said Roy Duncan, "I go there often."

White-vested, a trifle paunchy, with large broad feet, a shaven moon of red face, and abundant taffy-colored hair, the Reverend John Smallwood, pastor of the First Baptist Church, walked heavily up the street, greeting his parishioners warmly, and hoping to see his Pilot face to face. Instead, however, he encountered the Honorable William Jennings Bryan, who was coming slowly out of the bookstore. The two close friends greeted each other affectionately, and, with a firm friendly laying on of hands, gave each to each the Christian aid of a benevolent exorcism.

Passed, on catspaw rubber tread, from the long dark bookstore, Professor L. B. Dunn, principal of Graded School No. 3, Montgomery Avenue. He smiled coldly at them with a gimlet narrowing of his spectacled eyes. The tell-tale cover of The New Republic peeked from his pocket. Clamped under his lean and freckled arm were new library copies of The Great Illusion, by Norman Angell, and The Ancient Grudge, by Owen Wister. A lifelong advocate of a union of the two great English-speaking (sic) nations, making together irresistibly for peace, truth, and righteousness in a benevolent but firm authority over the less responsible elements of civilization, he passed, the Catholic man, pleasantly dedicated to the brave adventuring of minds and the salvaging of mankind. Ah, yes!

"That," observed the Commoner with grave humor, "is what I thought the Great American People said to me on three occasions." It was a favorite jest -- ripe with wisdom, mellowed by the years, yet, withal, so characteristic of the man. The deep furrows of his mouth widened in a smile. Our master -- famous, calm, and dead.

"Just the man I was looking for," said Brother Smallwood. In silence, slowly, they shook hands for several seconds. Silence was pleased.

"Ah, there, Dick," said John Smallwood, clasping his hand affectionately, and squeezing his arm. "Just the man I was looking for. Do you know Mr. Bryan?"

"And how are you and the Good Woman enjoying your sojourn in the Land of the Sky?" said the Reverend John Smallwood.

"Three, I think, sir," said Mr. Gorman, blushing prettily.

"Our only regret," said the Commoner, "is that our visit here must be measured by days and not by months. Nay, by years."

Mr. Richard Gorman, twenty-six, city reporter of The Citizen, strode rapidly up the street, with proud cold news-nose lifted. His complacent smile, hard-lipped, loosened into servility.

"As fellow newspaper men," said the Commoner, "Dick and I have been close friends for -- how many years is it, my boy?"

"I wish you could have been here, Dick," said the Reverend Smallwood, "to hear what Mr. Bryan was saying about us. The good people of this town would be mighty proud to hear it."

"I'd like another statement from you before you go, Mr. Bryan," said Richard Gorman. "There's a story going the rounds that you may make your home with us in the future."

The reporter made notes rapidly.

When questioned by a Citizen reporter, Mr. Bryan refused either to confirm or deny the rumor:

"I may have a statement to make later," he observed with a significant smile, "but at present I must content myself by saying that if I could have chosen the place of my birth, I could not have found a fairer spot than this wonderland of nature."

Earthly Paradise, thinks Commoner.

"I have travelled far in my day," continued the man who had been chosen three times by a great Party to contend for the highest honor within the gift of the people. "I have gone from the woods of Maine to the wave-washed sands of Florida, from Hatteras to Halifax, and from the summits of the Rockies to where Missouri rolls her turgid flood, but I have seen few spots that equal, and none that surpass, the beauty of this mountain Eden."

The years of his glory washed back to him upon the rolling tides of rhetoric -- the great lost days of the first crusade when the money barons trembled beneath the shadow of the Cross of Gold, and Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! Bryan! burned through the land like a comet. Ere I was old. 1896. Ah, woeful ere, which tells me youth's no longer here.

Foresees Dawn of New Era.

When pressed more closely by the reporter as to his future plans, Mr. Bryan replied:

"My schedule is completely filled, for months to come, with speaking engagements that will take me from one end of the country to the other, in the fight I am making for the reduction of the vast armaments that form the chief obstacle to the reign of peace on earth, good-will to men. After that, who knows?" he said, flashing his famous smile. "Perhaps I shall come back to this beautiful region, and take up my life among my good friends here as one who, having fought the good fight, deserves to spend the declining years of his life not only within sight, but within the actual boundaries, of the happy land of Canaan."

Asked if he could predict with any certainty the date of his proposed retirement, the Commoner answered characteristically with the following beautiful quotation from Longfellow:

And the battle-flags were furled

"When the war-drum throbbed no longer,

The Federation of the world."

In the Parliament of man,

The magic cell of music -- the electric piano in the shallow tiled lobby of Altamont's favorite cinema, the Ajax, stopped playing with firm, tinny abruptness, hummed ominously for a moment, and without warning commenced anew. It's a long way to Tipperary. The world shook with the stamp of marching men.

Miss Margaret Blanchard and Mrs. C. M. McReady, the druggist's drugged wife who, by the white pitted fabric of her skin, and the wide bright somnolence of her eyes, on honey-dew had fed too often, came out of the theatre and turned down toward Wood's pharmacy.

To-day: Maurice Costello and Edith M. Storey in Throw Out the Lifeline, a Vitagraph Release.

Goggling, his great idiot's head lolling on his scrawny neck, wearing the wide-rimmed straw hat that covered him winter and summer, Willie Goff, the pencil merchant, jerked past, with inward lunges of his crippled right foot. The fingers of his withered arm pointed stiffly toward himself, beckoning to him, and touching him as he walked with stiff jerking taps, in a terrible parody of vanity. A gaudy handkerchief with blue, yellow and crimson patterns hung in a riotous blot from his breast-pocket over his neatly belted gray Norfolk jacket, a wide loose collar of silk barred with red and orange stripes flowered across his narrow shoulders. In his lapel a huge red carnation. His thin face, beneath the jutting globular head, grinned constantly, glutting his features with wide, lapping, receding, returning, idiot smiles. For should he live a thousand years, he never will be out of humor. He burred ecstatically at the passers-by, who grinned fondly at him, and continued down to Wood's where he was greeted with loud cheers and laughter by a group of young men who loitered at the fountain's end. They gathered around him boisterously, pounding his back and drawing him up to the fountain. Pleased, he looked at them warmly, gratefully. He was touched and happy.

"Give me a dope," said Willie Goff to the grinning jerker, "a dope and lime."

Pudge Carr, the politician's son, laughed hilariously. "Want a dope and lime, do you, Willie?" he said, and struck him heavily on the back. His thick stupid face composed itself.

"What're you having, Willie?" said Mr. Tobias Pottle.

"Have a cigarette, Willie," he said, offering the package to Willie Goff.

Pudge Carr held a lighted match to Willie's cigarette, winking slowly at Brady Chalmers, a tall, handsome fellow, with black hair, and a long dark face. Willie Goff drew in on his cigarette, lighting it with dry smacking lips. He coughed, removed the weed, and held it awkwardly between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it, curiously.

"What's yours?" said the jerker to Toby Pottle.

They sputtered with laughter, involved and lost in clouds of fume, and guzzling deep, the boor, the lackey, and the groom.

"I don't want anything," said Pudge Carr. Such drinks as made them nobly wild, not mad.

"Give me a dope, too."

Brady Chalmers took Willie's colored handkerchief gently from his pocket and held it up for their inspection. Then he folded it carefully and put it back.

Toby Pottle blew a luxurious jet of smoke through his nostrils. He was twenty-four, carefully groomed, with slick blond hair, and a pink massaged face.

"Come on, Willie," he said, blandly, quietly, "you've got a girl, haven't you?"

Willie Goff grinned cunningly.

Willie Goff leered knowingly; at the counter-end, Tim McCall, twenty-eight, who had been slowly feeding cracked ice from his cupped fist into his bloated whisky-fierce jowls, collapsed suddenly, blowing a bright rattling hail upon the marble ledge.

"What are you all dressed up about, Willie?" he said. "You must be going to see your girl."

Flushed with high ringing laughter, they smiled, spoke respectfully, uncovered before Miss Tot Webster, Miss Mary McGraw, and Miss Martha Cotton, older members of the Younger Set. They called for stronger music, louder wine.

"I've got several," said Willie Goff. "A fellow's got to have a little Poon-Tang, hasn't he?"

"How do you do?"

"Aha! Aha!" said Brady Chalmers to Miss Mary McGraw. "Where were YOU that time?"

"Come on back, Pudge," said Euston Phipps, their escort. "You too, Brady." He followed the ladies back -- tall, bold, swagger -- a young alcoholic with one sound lung. He was a good golfer.

"Do you work around here, boy?"

"YOU'LL never know," she called back. It was between them -- their little secret. They laughed knowingly with joy of possession.

"All right, son. Two dopes and a mint Limeade. Make it snappy."

Pert boys rushed from the crowded booths and tables to the fountain, coming up with a long slide. They shouted their orders rudely, nagging the swift jerkers glibly, stridently.

The jerkers moved in ragtime tempo, juggling the drinks, tossing scooped globes of ice-cream into the air and catching them in glasses, beating swift rhythms with a spoon.

Seated alone, with thick brown eyes above her straw regardant, Mrs. Thelma Jarvis, the milliner, drew, in one swizzling guzzle, the last beaded chain of linked sweetness long drawn out from the bottom of her glass. Drink to me only with thine eyes. She rose slowly, looking into the mirror of her open purse. Then, fluescent, her ripe limbs moulded in a dress of silk henna, she writhed carefully among the crowded tables, with a low rich murmur of contrition. Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low -- an excellent thing in a woman. The high light chatter of the tables dropped as she went by. For God's sake, hold your tongue and let me love! On amber undulant limbs she walked slowly up the aisle past perfume, stationery, rubber goods, and toilet preparations, pausing at the cigar counter to pay her check. Her round, melon-heavy breasts nodded their heads in slow but sprightly dance. A poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company.

Mrs. Thelma Jarvis turned her warm ivory stare upon them, parted her full small mouth in a remote smile, and passed, ambulant. When she had gone they turned to each other, grinning quietly. We'll be waiting at the river. Swiftly they glanced about them. No one had seen.

But -- at the entrance, standing in the alcove by the magazine rack, Mr. Paul Goodson, of the Dependable Life, closed his long grinning dish-face abruptly, and ceased talking. He doffed his hat without effusiveness, as did his companion, Coston Smathers, the furniture man (you furnish the girl, we furnish the house). They were both Baptists.

Patroness of all the arts, but particular sponsor for Music, Heavenly Maid, Mrs. Franz Wilhelm Von Zeck, wife of the noted lung specialist, and the discoverer of Von Zeck's serum, came imperially from the doors of the Fashion Mart, and was handed tenderly into the receiving cushions of her Cadillac by Mr. Louis Rosalsky. Benevolently but distantly she smiled down upon him: the white parchment of his hard Polish face was broken by a grin of cruel servility curving up around the wings of his immense putty-colored nose. Frau Von Zeck settled her powerful chins upon the coarse shelving of her Wagnerian breasts and, her ponderous gaze already dreaming on remote philanthropies, was charioted smoothly away from the devoted tradesman. Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was Ich leide.

For the third time the Misses Mildred Shuford, Helen Pendergast, and Mary Catherine Bruce drove by, clustered together like unpicked cherries in the front seat of Miss Shuford's Reo. They passed, searching the pavements with eager, haughty eyes, pleased at their proud appearance. They turned up Liberty Street on their fourth swing round the circle. Waltz me around again, Willie.

"Do you know how to dance, George?" Eugene asked. His heart was full of bitter pride and fear.

He answered Eugene's laughter with a puzzled sheepish grin.

"Yes," said George Graves absently, "a little bit. I don't like it." He lifted his brooding eyes.

"Say, 'Gene," he said, "how much do you think Dr. Von Zeck is worth?"

They dodged nimbly across the narrow street, amid the thickening afternoon traffic.

Mr. Rosalsky returned into his store.

"It's getting worse all the time," said George Graves. "The people who laid the town out didn't have any vision. What's it going to be like, ten years from now?"

"Come on," said Eugene. "I'll match you for a drink."

"When that day comes," Professor Dunn implacably continued, "remember what I told you. The German government has imperialistic designs upon the whole of the world. It is looking to the day when it shall have all mankind under the yoke of Krupp and Kultur. The fate of civilization is hanging in the balance. Mankind is at the crossroads. I pray God it shall not be said that we were found wanting. I pray God that this free people may never suffer as little Belgium suffered, that our wives and daughters may not be led off into slavery or shame, our children maimed and slaughtered."

"No. Not now. You'd have to move all the buildings back. Wonder how much it would cost?" said George Graves thoughtfully.

"They could widen the streets, couldn't they?" said Eugene.

"And if we don't," Professor L. B. Dunn's precise voice sounded its cold warning, "their next move will be directed against us. You may yet live to see the day when the iron heel of militarism is on your neck, and the armed forces of the Kaiser do the goose-step up and down this street. When that day comes --"

"I don't put any stock in those stories," said Mr. Bob Webster rudely and irreverently. He was a small man, with a gray, mean face, violent and bitter. A chronic intestinal sourness seemed to have left its print upon his features. "In my opinion, it's all propaganda. Those Germans are too damn good for them, that's all. They're beginning to call for calf-rope."

"Did you know the Wheeler boys?" Eugene asked George Graves. "Paul and Clifton?"

"Yes," said George Graves. "They went away and joined the French army. They're in the Foreign Legion."

"It's not our fight," said Mr. Bob Webster. "I don't want to send my boys three thousand miles across the sea to get shot for those foreigners. If they come over here, I'll shoulder a gun with the best of them, but until they do they can fight it out among themselves. Isn't that right, Judge?" he said, turning toward the party of the third part, Judge Walter C. Jeter, of the Federal Circuit, who had fortunately been a close friend of Grover Cleveland. Ancestral voices prophesying war.

"They're in the aviation part of it," said Eugene. "The Lafayette Eskydrill. Clifton Wheeler has shot down more than six Germans."

"How old was he?" he asked.

Eugene winced slightly at the sound of the word.

"The boys around here didn't like him," said George Graves. "They thought he was a sissy."

"He was a grown man," said George. "Twenty-two or three."

"-- But fortunately," continued Judge Walter C. Jeter deliberately, "we have a man in the White House on whose far-seeing statesmanship we can safely rely. Let us trust to the wisdom of his leadership, obeying, in word and spirit, the principles of strict neutrality, accepting only as a last resort a course that would lead this great nation again into the suffering and tragedy of war, which," his voice sank to a whisper, "God forbid!"

Disappointed, Eugene considered his chance of glory. (Ich bin ja noch ein Kind.)

Colonel Pettigrew was wrapped to his waist in a heavy rug, his shoulders were covered with a gray Confederate cape. He bent forward, leaning his old weight upon a heavy polished stick, which his freckled hand gripped upon the silver knob. Muttering, his proud powerful old head turned shakily from side to side, darting fierce splintered glances at the drifting crowd. He was a very parfit gentil knight.

Thinking of a more ancient war, in which he had borne himself gallantly, Colonel James Buchanan Pettigrew, head of the Pettigrew Military Academy (Est. 1789), rode by in his open victoria, behind an old negro driver and two well-nourished brown mares. There was a good brown smell of horse and sweat-cured leather. The old negro snaked his whip gently across the sleek trotting rumps, growling softly.

"I want a chock-lut milk," said Eugene.

"Make it two," added George Graves.

He muttered.

He muttered his disgust. Not the same! Not the same! Nothing the same! In his proud youth, in the only war that mattered, Colonel Pettigrew had marched at the head of his own cadets. There were 117, sir, all under nineteen. They stepped forward to a man… until not a single commissioned officer was left… 36 came back… since 1789… it must go on!… 19, sir -- all under one hundred and seventeen… must… go… on!

In the crowd of loafing youngsters that stood across the threshold of Wood's pharmacy, Colonel Pettigrew's darting eyes saw two of his own cadets. They were pimply youths, with slack jaws and a sloppy carriage.

O for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth!

"Yes, suh," said the negro. They drove on.

"What's yours?" he said irritably.

George Graves and Eugene entered Wood's pharmacy and stood up to the counter. The elder soda-jerker, scowling, drew a sopping rag across a puddle of slop upon the marble slab.

"Go on! Go on, you scoundrel!" said Colonel Pettigrew.

"Suh?" said the negro, pulling in on his reins, and turning around.

His sagging cheek-flanks trembled gently. The horses trotted out of sight around the corner, with a smooth-spoked rumble of rubber tires.