"There has been contemptible work here," he whispered—"spite and a mean spirit of reprisal. I have been making a secret investigation, and I find that this blow at your son and you, and at the good name of our college was struck by one man, a man with a grievance—Doctor Gilman. Doctor Gilman has repeatedly desired me to raise his salary." This did not happen to be true, but in such a crisis Doctor Black could not afford to be too particular.

"I have seen no reason for raising his salary—and there you have the explanation. In revenge he has made this attack. But he overshot his mark. In causing us temporary embarrassment he has brought about his own downfall. I have already asked for his resignation."

Every day in the week Hallowell was a fair, sane man, but on this particular day he was wounded, his spirit was hurt, his self-esteem humiliated. He was in a state of mind to believe anything rather than that his son was an idiot.

"I don't want the man discharged," he protested, "just because Peter is lazy. But if Doctor Gilman was moved by personal considerations, if he sacrificed my Peter in order to get even...."

"That," exclaimed Black in a horrified whisper, "is exactly what he did! Your generosity to the college is well known. You are recognized all over America as its patron. And he believed that when I refused him an increase in salary it was really you who refused it—and he struck at you through your son. Everybody thinks so. The college is on fire with indignation. And look at the mark he gave Peter! Five! That in itself shows the malice. Five is not a mark, it is an insult! No one, certainly not your brilliant son—look how brilliantly he managed the glee-club and foot-ball tour—is stupid enough to deserve five. No, Doctor Gilman went too far. And he has been justly punished!"

What Hallowell senior was willing to believe of what the chancellor told him, and his opinion of the matter as expressed to Peter, differed materially.

"They tell me," he concluded, "that in the fall they will give you another examination, and if you pass then, you will get your degree. No one will know you've got it. They'll slip it to you out of the side-door like a cold potato to a tramp. The only thing people will know is that when your classmates stood up and got their parchments—the thing they'd been working for four years, the only reason for their going to college at all—YOU were not among those present. That's your fault; but if you don't get your degree next fall that will be my fault. I've supported you through college and you've failed to deliver the goods. Now you deliver them next fall, or you can support yourself."

"That will be all right," said Peter humbly; "I'll pass next fall."

"I'm going to make sure of that," said Hallowell senior. "To-morrow you will take those history books that you did not open, especially Gilman's 'Rise and Fall,' which it seems you have not even purchased, and you will travel for the entire summer with a private tutor...."

Peter, who had personally conducted the foot-ball and base-ball teams over half of the Middle States and daily bullied and browbeat them, protested with indignation. "WON'T travel with a private tutor!"

"If I say so," returned Hallowell senior grimly, "you'll travel with a governess and a trained nurse, and wear a strait jacket. And you'll continue to wear it until you can recite the history of Turkey backward. And in order that you may know it backward—and forward you will spend this summer in Turkey—in Constantinople—until I send you permission to come home."

"Constantinople!" yelled Peter. "In August! Are you serious?"

"Do I look it?" asked Peter's father. He did.

"In Constantinople," explained Mr. Hallowell senior, "there will be nothing to distract you from your studies, and in spite of yourself every minute you will be imbibing history and local color."

"I'll be imbibing fever,", returned Peter, "and sunstroke and sudden death. If you want to get rid of me, why don't you send me to the island where they sent Dreyfus? It's quicker. You don't have to go to Turkey to study about Turkey."

"You do!" said his father.

Peter did not wait for the festivities of commencement week. All day he hid in his room, packing his belongings or giving them away to the members of his class, who came to tell him what a rotten shame it was, and to bid him good-by. They loved Peter for himself alone, and at losing him were loyally enraged. They sired publicly to express their sentiments, and to that end they planned a mock trial of the "Rise and Fall," at which a packed jury would sentence it to cremation. They planned also to hang Doctor Gilman in effigy. The effigy with a rope round its neck was even then awaiting mob violence. It was complete to the silver-white beard and the gold spectacles. But Peter squashed both demonstrations. He did not know Doctor Gilman had been forced to resign, but he protested that the horse-play of his friends would make him appear a bad loser. "It would look, boys," he said, "as though I couldn't take my medicine. Looks like kicking against the umpire's decision. Old Gilman fought fair. He gave me just what was coming to me. I think a darn sight more of him than do of that bunch of boot-lickers that had the colossal nerve to pretend I scored fifty!"

Doctor Gilman sat in his cottage that stood the edge of the campus, gazing at a plaster bust of Socrates which he did not see. Since that morning he had ceased to sit in the chair of history at Stillwater College. They were retrenching, the chancellor had told him curtly, cutting down unnecessary expenses, for even in his anger Doctor Black was too intelligent to hint at his real motive, and the professor was far too innocent of evil, far too detached from college politics to suspect. He would remain a professor emeritus on half pay, but he no longer would teach. The college he had served for thirty years-since it consisted of two brick buildings and a faculty of ten young men—no longer needed him. Even his ivy-covered cottage, in which his wife and he had lived for twenty years, in which their one child had died, would at the beginning of the next term be required of him. But the college would allow him those six months in which to "look round." So, just outside the circle of light from his student lamp, he sat in his study, and stared with unseeing eyes at the bust of Socrates. He was not considering ways and means. They must be faced later. He was considering how he could possibly break the blow to his wife. What eviction from that house would mean to her no one but he understood. Since the day their little girl had died, nothing in the room that had been her playroom, bedroom, and nursery had been altered, nothing had been touched. To his wife, somewhere in the house that wonderful, God-given child was still with them. Not as a memory but as a real and living presence. When at night the professor and his wife sat at either end of the study table, reading by the same lamp, he would see her suddenly lift her head, alert and eager, as though from the nursery floor a step had sounded, as though from the darkness a sleepy voice had called her. And when they would be forced to move to lodgings in the town, to some students' boarding-house, though they could take with them their books, their furniture, their mutual love and comradeship, they must leave behind them the haunting presence of the child, the colored pictures she had cut from the Christmas numbers and plastered over the nursery walls, the rambler roses that with her own hands she had planted and that now climbed to her window and each summer peered into her empty room.

Outside Doctor Gilman's cottage, among the trees of the campus, paper lanterns like oranges aglow were swaying in the evening breeze. In front of Hallowell the flame of a bonfire shot to the top of the tallest elms, and gathered in a circle round it the glee club sang, and cheer succeeded cheer-cheers for the heroes of the cinder track, for the heroes of the diamond and the gridiron, cheers for the men who had flunked especially for one man who had flunked. But for that man who for thirty years in the class room had served the college there were no cheers. No one remembered him, except the one student who had best reason to remember him. But this recollection Peter had no rancor or bitterness and, still anxious lest he should be considered a bad loser, he wished Doctor Gilman a every one else to know that. So when the celebration was at its height and just before train was due to carry him from Stillwater, ran across the campus to the Gilman cottage say good-by. But he did not enter the cottage He went so far only as half-way up the garden walk. In the window of the study which opened upon the veranda he saw through frame of honeysuckles the professor and wife standing beside the study table. They were clinging to each other, the woman weep silently with her cheek on his shoulder, thin, delicate, well-bred hands clasping arms, while the man comforted her awkward unhappily, with hopeless, futile caresses.

Peter, shocked and miserable at what he had seen, backed steadily away. What disaster had befallen the old couple he could not imagine. The idea that he himself might in any way connected with their grief never entered mind. He was certain only that, whatever the trouble was, it was something so intimate and personal that no mere outsider might dare to offer his sympathy. So on tiptoe he retreated down the garden walk and, avoiding the celebration at the bonfire, returned to his rooms. An hour later the entire college escorted him to the railroad station, and with "He's a jolly good fellow" and "He's off to Philippopolis in the morn—ing" ringing in his ears, he sank back his seat in the smoking-car and gazed at the lights of Stillwater disappearing out of his life. And he was surprised to find that what lingered his mind was not the students, dancing like Indians round the bonfire, or at the steps of the smoking-car fighting to shake his hand, but the man and woman alone in the cottage stricken with sudden sorrow, standing like two children lost in the streets, who cling to each other for comfort and at the same moment whisper words of courage.

Two months Later, at Constantinople, Peter, was suffering from remorse over neglected opportunities, from prickly heat, and from fleas. And it not been for the moving-picture man, and the poker and baccarat at the Cercle Oriental, he would have flung himself into the Bosphorus. In the mornings with the tutor he read ancient history, which he promptly forgot; and for the rest of the hot, dreary day with the moving-picture man through the bazaars and along the water-front he stalked suspects for the camera.

The name of the moving-picture man was Harry Stetson. He had been a newspaper reporter, a press-agent, and an actor in vaudeville and in a moving-picture company. Now on his own account he was preparing an illustrated lecture on the East, adapted to churches and Sunday-schools. Peter and he wrote it in collaboration, and in the evenings rehearsed it with lantern slides before an audience of the hotel clerk, the tutor, and the German soldier of fortune who was trying to sell the young Turks very old battleships. Every other foreigner had fled the city, and the entire diplomatic corps had removed itself to the summer capital at Therapia.

There Stimson, the first secretary of the embassy and, in the absence of the ambassador, CHARGE D'AFFAIRES, invited Peter to become his guest. Stimson was most anxious to be polite to Peter, for Hallowell senior was a power in the party then in office, and a word from him at Washington in favor of a rising young diplomat would do no harm. But Peter was afraid his father would consider Therapia "out of bounds."

"He sent me to Constantinople," explained Peter, "and if he thinks I'm not playing the game the Lord only knows where he might send me next-and he might cut off my allowance."

In the matter of allowance Peter's father had been most generous. This was fortunate, for poker, as the pashas and princes played it at he Cercle, was no game for cripples or children. But, owing to his letter-of-credit and his illspent life, Peter was able to hold his own against men three times his age and of fortunes nearly equal to that of his father. Only they disposed of their wealth differently. On many hot evening Peter saw as much of their money scattered over the green table as his father had spent over the Hallowell athletic field.

In this fashion Peter spent his first month of exile—in the morning trying to fill his brain with names of great men who had been a long time dead, and in his leisure hours with local color. To a youth of his active spirit it was a full life without joy or recompense. A Letter from Charley Hines, a classmate who lived at Stillwater, which arrived after Peter had endured six weeks of Constantinople, released him from boredom and gave life a real interest. It was a letter full of gossip intended to amuse. One paragraph failed of its purpose. It read: "Old man Gilman has got the sack. The chancellor offered him up as a sacrifice to your father, and because he was unwise enough to flunk you. He is to move out in September. I ran across them last week when I was looking for rooms for a Freshman cousin. They were reserving one in the same boarding-house. It's a shame, and I know you'll agree. They are a fine old couple, and I don't like to think of them herding with Freshmen in a shine boardinghouse. Black always was a swine."

Peter spent fully ten minutes getting to the cable office.

"Just learned," he cabled his father, "Gilman dismissed because flunked me consider this outrageous please see he is reinstated."

The answer, which arrived the next day, did not satisfy Peter. It read: "Informed Gilman acted through spite have no authority as you know to interfere any act of black."

Since Peter had learned of the disaster that through his laziness had befallen the Gilmans, his indignation at the injustice had been hourly increasing. Nor had his banishment to Constantinople strengthened his filial piety. On the contrary, it had rendered him independent and but little inclined to kiss the paternal rod. In consequence his next cable was not conciliatory.

"Dismissing Gilman Looks more Like we acted through spite makes me appear contemptible Black is a toady will do as you direct please reinstate."

To this somewhat peremptory message his father answered:

"If your position unpleasant yourself to blame not Black incident is closed."

"Is it?" said the son of his father. He called Stetson to his aid and explained. Stetson reminded him of the famous cablegram of his distinguished contemporary: "Perdicaris alive and Raisuli dead!"

Peter's paraphrase of this ran: "Gilman returns to Stillwater or I will not try for degree."

The reply was equally emphatic:

"You earn your degree or you earn your own living."

This alarmed Stetson, but caused Peter to deliver his ultimatum: "Choose to earn my own living am leaving Constantinople."

Within a few days Stetson was also leaving Constantinople by steamer via Naples. Peter, who had come to like him very much, would have accompanied him had he not preferred to return home more leisurely by way of Paris and London.

"You'll get there long before I do," said Peter, "and as soon as you arrive I want you to go to Stillwater and give Doctor Gilman some souvenir of Turkey from me. Just to show him I've no hard feelings. He wouldn't accept money, but he can't refuse a present. I want it to be something characteristic of the country, Like a prayer rug, or a scimitar, or an illuminated Koran, or..."

Somewhat doubtfully, somewhat sheepishly, Stetson drew from his pocket a flat morocco case and opened it. "What's the matter with one of these?" he asked.

In a velvet-lined jewel case was a star of green enamel and silver gilt. To it was attached a ribbon of red and green.

"That's the Star of the Crescent," said Peter. "Where did you buy it?"

"Buy it!" exclaimed Stetson. "You don't buy them. The Sultan bestows them."

"I'll bet the Sultan didn't bestow that one," said Peter.

"I'll bet," returned Stetson, "I've got something in my pocket that says he did."

He unfolded an imposing document covered with slanting lines of curving Arabic letters in gold. Peter was impressed but still skeptical.

"What does that say when it says it in English?" he asked.

"It says," translated Stetson, "that his Imperial Majesty, the Sultan, bestows upon Henry Stetson, educator, author, lecturer, the Star of the Order of the Crescent, of the fifth class, for services rendered to Turkey."

Peter interrupted him indignantly.

"Never try to fool the fakirs, my son," he protested. "I'm a fakir myself. What services did you ever...."

"Services rendered," continued Stetson undisturbed, "in spreading throughout the United States a greater knowledge of the customs, industries, and religion of the Ottoman Empire. That," he explained, "refers to my—I should say our—moving-picture lecture. I thought it would look well if, when I lectured on Turkey, I wore a Turkish decoration, so I went after this one."

Peter regarded his young friend with incredulous admiration.

"But did they believe you," he demanded, "when you told them you were an author and educator?"

Stetson closed one eye and grinned. "They believed whatever I paid them to believe."

"If you can get one of those," cried Peter, "Old man Gilman ought to get a dozen. I'll tell them he's the author of the longest and dullest history of their flea-bitten empire that was ever written. And he's a real professor and a real author, and I can prove it. I'll show them the five volumes with his name in each. How much did that thing cost you?"

"Two hundred dollars in bribes," said Stetson briskly, "and two months of diplomacy."

"I haven't got two months for diplomacy," said Peter, "so I'll have to increase the bribes. I'll stay here and get the decoration for Gilman, and you work the papers at home. No one ever heard of the Order of the Crescent, but that only makes it the easier for us. They'll only know what we tell them, and we'll tell them it's the highest honor ever bestowed by a reigning sovereign upon an American scholar. If you tell the people often enough that anything is the best they believe you. That's the way father sells his hams. You've been a press-agent. From now on you're going to be my press-agent—I mean Doctor Gilman's press-agent. I pay your salary, but your work is to advertise him and the Order of the Crescent. I'll give you a letter to Charley Hines at Stillwater. He sends out college news to a syndicate and he's the local Associated Press man. He's sore at their discharging Gilman and he's my best friend, and he'll work the papers as far as you like. Your job is to make Stillwater College and Doctor Black and my father believe that when they lost Gilman they lost the man who made Stillwater famous. And before we get through boosting Gilman, we'll make my father's million-dollar gift laboratory look like an insult."

In the eyes of the former press-agent the light of battle burned fiercely, memories of his triumphs in exploitation, of his strategies and tactics in advertising soared before him.

"It's great!" he exclaimed. "I've got your idea and you've got me. And you're darned lucky to get me. I've been press-agent for politicians, actors, society leaders, breakfast foods, and horse-shows—and I'm the best! I was in charge of the publicity bureau for Galloway when he ran for governor. He thinks the people elected him. I know I did. Nora Nashville was getting fifty dollars a week in vaudeville when I took hold of her; now she gets a thousand. I even made people believe Mrs. Hampton-Rhodes was a society leader at Newport, when all she ever saw of Newport was Bergers and the Muschenheim-Kings. Why, I am the man that made the American People believe Russian dancers can dance!"

"It's plain to see you hate yourself," said 'Peter. "You must not get so despondent or you might commit suicide. How much money will you want?"

"How much have you got?"

"All kinds," said Peter. "Some in a letter-of-credit that my father earned from the fretful pig, and much more in cash that I won at poker from the pashas. When that's gone I've got to go to work and earn my living. Meanwhile your salary is a hundred a week and all you need to boost Gilman and the Order of the Crescent. We are now the Gilman Defense, Publicity, and Development Committee, and you will begin by introducing me to the man I am to bribe."

"In this country you don't need any introduction to the man you want to bribe," exclaimed Stetson; "you just bribe him!"

That same night in the smoking-room of the hotel, Peter and Stetson made their first move in the game of winning for Professor Gilman the Order of the Crescent. Stetson presented Peter to a young effendi in a frock coat and fez. Stetson called him Osman. He was a clerk in the foreign office and appeared to be "a friend of a friend of a friend" of the assistant third secretary.

The five volumes of the "Rise and Fall" were spread before him, and Peter demanded to know why so distinguished a scholar as Doctor Gilman had not received some recognition from the country he had so sympathetically described. Osman fingered the volumes doubtfully, and promised the matter should be brought at once to the attention of the grand vizier.

After he had departed Stetson explained that Osman had just as little chance of getting within speaking distance of the grand vizier as of the ladies of his harem.

"It's like Tammany," said Stetson; "there are sachems, district leaders, and lieutenants. Each of them is entitled to trade or give away a few of these decorations, just as each district leader gets his percentage of jobs in the street-cleaning department. This fellow will go to his patron, his patron will go to some undersecretary in the cabinet, he will put it up to a palace favorite, and they will divide your money.

"In time the minister of foreign affairs will sign your brevet and a hundred others, without knowing what he is signing; then you cable me, and the Star of the Crescent will burst upon the United States in a way that will make Halley's comet look like a wax match."

The next day Stetson and the tutor sailed for home and Peter was left alone to pursue, as he supposed, the Order of the Crescent. On the contrary, he found that the Order of the Crescent was pursuing him. He had not appreciated that, from underlings and backstair politicians, an itinerant showman like Stetson and the only son of an American Croesus would receive very different treatment.

Within twenty-four hours a fat man with a blue-black beard and diamond rings called with Osman to apologize for the latter. Osman, the fat man explained—had been about to make a fatal error. For Doctor Gilman he had asked the Order of the Crescent of the fifth class, the same class that had been given Stetson. The fifth class, the fat man explained, was all very well for tradesmen, dragomans, and eunuchs, but as an honor for a savant as distinguished as the friend of his. Hallowell, the fourth class would hardly be high enough. The fees, the fat man added, would Also be higher; but, he pointed out, it was worth the difference, because the fourth class entitled the wearer to a salute from all sentries.

"There are few sentries at Stillwater," said Peter; "but I want the best and I want it quick. Get me the fourth class."

The next morning he was surprised by an early visit from Stimson of the embassy. The secretary was considerably annoyed.

"My dear Hallowell," he protested, "why the devil didn't you tell me you wanted a decoration? Of course the State department expressly forbids us to ask for one for ourselves, or for any one else. But what's the Constitution between friends? I'll get it for you at once—but, on two conditions: that you don't tell anybody I got it, and that you tell me why you want it, and what you ever did to deserve it."

Instead, Peter explained fully and so sympathetically that the diplomat demanded that he, too, should be enrolled as one of the Gilman Defense Committee.

"Doctor Gilman's history," he said, "must be presented to the Sultan. You must have the five volumes rebound in red and green, the colors of Mohammed, and with as much gold tooling as they can carry. I hope," he added, "they are not soiled."

"Not by me," Peter assured him.

"I will take them myself," continued Stimson, "to Muley Pasha, the minister of foreign affairs, and ask him to present them to his Imperial Majesty. He will promise to do so, but he won't; but he knows I know he won't so that is all right. And in return he will present us with the Order of the Crescent of the third class."

"Going up!" exclaimed Peter. "The third class. That will cost me my entire letter-of-credit."

"Not at all," said Stimson. "I've saved you from the grafters. It will cost you only what you pay to have the books rebound. And the THIRD class is a real honor of which any one might be proud. You wear it round your neck, and at your funeral it entitles you to an escort of a thousand soldiers."

"I'd rather put up with fewer soldiers," said Peter, "and wear it longer round my neck What's the matter with our getting the second class or the first class?"

At such ignorance Stimson could not repress a smile.

"The first class," he explained patiently, "is the Great Grand Cross, and is given only to reigning sovereigns. The second is called the Grand Cross, and is bestowed only on crowned princes, prime ministers, and men of world-wide fame...."

"What's the matter with Doctor Gilman's being of world-wide fame?" said Peter. "He will be some day, when Stetson starts boosting."

"Some day," retorted Stimson stiffly, "I may be an ambassador. When I am I hope to get the Grand Cross of the Crescent, but not now. I'm sorry you're not satisfied," he added aggrievedly. "No one can get you anything higher than the third class, and I may lose my official head asking for that."

"Nothing is too good for old man Gilman," said Peter, "nor for you. You get the third class for him, and I'll have father make you an ambassador."

That night at poker at the club Peter sat next to Prince Abdul, who had come from a reception at the Grand vizier's and still wore his decorations. Decorations now fascinated Peter, and those on the coat of the young prince he regarded with wide-eyed awe. He also regarded Abdul with wide-eyed awe, because he was the favorite nephew of the Sultan, and because he enjoyed the reputation of having the worst reputation in Turkey. Peter wondered why. He always had found Abdul charming, distinguished, courteous to the verge of humility, most cleverly cynical, most brilliantly amusing. At poker he almost invariably won, and while doing so was so politely bored, so indifferent to his cards and the cards held by others, that Peter declared he had never met his equal.

In a pause in the game, while some one tore the cover off a fresh pack, Peter pointed at the star of diamonds that nestled behind the lapel of Abdul's coat.

"May I ask what that is?" said Peter.

The prince frowned at his diamond sunburst as though it annoyed him, and then smiled delightedly.

"It is an order," he said in a quick aside, "bestowed only upon men of world-wide fame. I dined to-night," he explained, "with your charming compatriot, Mr. Joseph Stimson."

"And Joe told?" said Peter.

The prince nodded. "Joe told," he repeated; "but it is all arranged. Your distinguished friend, the Sage of Stillwater, will receive the Crescent of the third class."

Peter's eyes were still fastened hungrily upon the diamond sunburst.

"Why," he demanded, "can't some one get him one like that?"

As though about to take offense the prince raised his eyebrows, and then thought better of it and smiled.

"There are only two men in all Turkey," he said, "who could do that."

"And is the Sultan the other one?" asked Peter. The prince gasped as though he had suddenly stepped beneath a cold shower, and then laughed long and silently.

"You flatter me," he murmured.

"You know you could if you liked!" whispered Peter stoutly.

Apparently Abdul did not hear him. "I will take one card," he said.

Toward two in the morning there was seventy-five thousand francs in the pot, and all save Prince Abdul and Peter had dropped out. "Will you divide?" asked the prince.

"Why should I?" said Peter. "I've got you beat now. Do you raise me or call?" The prince called and laid down a full house. Peter showed four tens.

"I will deal you one hand, double or quits," said the prince.

Over the end of his cigar Peter squinted at the great heap of mother-of-pearl counters and gold-pieces and bank-notes.

"You will pay me double what is on the table," he said, "or you quit owing me nothing."

The prince nodded.

"Go ahead," said Peter.

The prince dealt them each a hand and discarded two cards. Peter held a seven, a pair of kings, and a pair of fours. Hoping to draw another king, which might give him a three higher than the three held by Abdul, he threw away the seven and the lower pair. He caught another king. The prince showed three queens and shrugged his shoulders.

Peter, leaning toward him, spoke out of the corner of his mouth.

"I'll make you a sporting proposition," he murmured. "You owe me a hundred and fifty thousand francs. I'll stake that against what only two men in the empire can give me."

The prince allowed his eyes to travel slowly round the circle of the table. But the puzzled glances of the other players showed that to them Peter's proposal conveyed no meaning.

The prince smiled cynically.

"For yourself?" he demanded.

"For Doctor Gilman," said Peter.

"We will cut for deal and one hand will decide," said the prince. His voice dropped to a whisper. "And no one must ever know," he warned.

Peter also could be cynical.

"Not even the Sultan," he said.

Abdul won the deal and gave himself a very good hand. But the hand he dealt Peter was the better one.

The prince was a good loser. The next afternoon the GAZETTE OFFICIALLY announced that upon Doctor Henry Gilman, professor emeritus of the University of Stillwater, U. S. A., the Sultan had been graciously pleased to confer the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crescent.

Peter flashed the great news to Stetson. The cable caught him at Quarantine. It read: "Captured Crescent, Grand Cross. Get busy."

But before Stetson could get busy the campaign of publicity had been brilliantly opened from Constantinople. Prince Abdul, although pitchforked into the Gilman Defense Committee, proved himself one of its most enthusiastic members.

"For me it becomes a case of NOBLESSE OBLIGE," he declared. "If it is worth doing at all it is worth doing well. To-day the Sultan will command that the 'Rise and Fall' be translated into Arabic, and that it be placed in the national library. Moreover, the University of Constantinople, the College of Salonica, and the National Historical Society have each elected Doctor Gilman an honorary member. I proposed him, the Patriarch of Mesopotamia seconded him. And the Turkish ambassador in America has been instructed to present the insignia with his own hands."

Nor was Peter or Stimson idle. To assist Stetson in his press-work, and to further the idea that all Europe was now clamoring for the "Rise and fall," Peter paid an impecunious but over-educated dragoman to translate it into five languages, and Stimson officially wrote of this, and of the bestowal of the Crescent to the State Department. He pointed out that not since General Grant had passed through Europe had the Sultan so highly honored an American. He added he had been requested by the grand vizier—who had been requested by Prince Abdul—to request the State Department to inform Doctor Gilman of these high honors. A request from such a source was a command and, as desired, the State Department wrote as requested by the grand vizier to Doctor Gilman, and tendered congratulations. The fact was sent out briefly from Washington by Associated Press. This official recognition by the Government and by the newspapers was all and more than Stetson wanted. He took off his coat and with a megaphone, rather than a pen, told the people of the United States who Doctor Gilman was, who the Sultan was, what a Grand Cross was, and why America's greatest historian was not without honor save in his own country. Columns of this were paid for and appeared as "patent insides," with a portrait of Doctor Gilman taken from the STILLWATER COLLEGE ANNUAL, and a picture of the Grand Cross drawn from imagination, in eight hundred newspapers of the Middle, Western, and Eastern States. special articles, paragraphs, portraits, and pictures of the Grand Cross followed, and, using Stillwater as his base, Stetson continued to flood the country. Young Hines, the local correspondent, acting under instructions by cable from Peter, introduced him to Doctor Gilman as a traveller who lectured on Turkey, and one who was a humble admirer of the author of the "Rise and fall." Stetson, having studied it as a student crams an examination, begged that he might sit at the feet of the master. And for several evenings, actually at his feet, on the steps of the ivy-covered cottage, the disguised press-agent drew from the unworldly and unsuspecting scholar the simple story of his life. To this, still in his character as disciple and student, he added photographs he himself made of the master, of the master's ivy-covered cottage, of his favorite walk across the campus, of the great historian at work at his desk, at work in his rose garden, at play with his wife on the croquet lawn. These he held until the insignia should be actually presented. This pleasing duty fell to the Turkish ambassador, who, much to his astonishment, had received instructions to proceed to Stillwater, Massachusetts, a place of which he had never heard, and present to a Doctor Gilman, of whom he had never heard, the Grand Cross of the Crescent. As soon as the insignia arrived in the official mail-bag a secretary brought it from Washington to Boston, and the ambassador travelled down from Bar Harbor to receive it, and with the secretary took the local train to Stillwater.

The reception extended to him there is still remembered by the ambassador as one of the happiest incidents of his distinguished career. Never since he came to represent his imperial Majesty in the Western republic had its barbarians greeted him in a manner in any way so nearly approaching his own idea of what was his due.

"This ambassador," Hines had explained to the mayor of Stillwater, who was also the proprietor of its largest department store, "is the personal representative of the Sultan. So we've got to treat him right."

"It's exactly," added Stetson, "as though the Sultan himself were coming."

"And so few crowned heads visit Stillwater," continued Hines, "that we ought to show we appreciate this one, especially as he comes to pay the highest honor known to Europe to one of our townsmen."

The mayor chewed nervously on his cigar.

"What'd I better do?" he asked.

"Mr. Stetson here," Hines pointed out, "has lived in Turkey, and he knows what they expect. Maybe he will help us."

"Will you?" begged the mayor.

"I will," said Stetson.

Then they visited the college authorities. Chancellor Black and most of the faculty were on their vacations. But there were half a dozen professors still in their homes around the campus, and it was pointed out to them that the coming honor to one lately of their number reflected glory upon the college and upon them, and that they should take official action.

It was also suggested that for photographic purposes they should wear their academic robes, caps, and hoods. To these suggestions, with alacrity—partly because they all loved Doctor Gilman and partly because they had never been photographed by a moving-picture machine—they all agreed. So it came about that when the ambassador, hot and cross and dusty stepped off the way-train at Stillwater station he found to his delighted amazement a red carpet stretching to a perfectly new automobile, a company of the local militia presenting arms, a committee, consisting of the mayor in a high hat and white gloves and three professors in gowns and colored hoods, and the Stillwater silver Cornet Band playing what, after several repetitions, the ambassador was graciously pleased to recognize as his national anthem.

The ambassador forgot that he was hot and cross. He forgot that he was dusty. His face radiated satisfaction and perspiration. Here at last were people who appreciated him and his high office. And as the mayor helped him into the automobile, and those students who lived in Stillwater welcomed him with strange yells, and the moving-picture machine aimed at him point blank, he beamed with condescension. But inwardly he was ill at ease.

Inwardly he was chastising himself for having, through his ignorance of America, failed to appreciate the importance of the man he had come to honor. When he remembered he had never even heard of Doctor Gilman he blushed with confusion. And when he recollected that he had been almost on the point of refusing to come to Stillwater, that he had considered leaving the presentation to his secretary, he shuddered. What might not the Sultan have done to him! What a narrow escape!

Attracted by the band, by the sight of their fellow townsmen in khaki, by the sight of the stout gentleman in the red fez, by a tremendous liking and respect for Doctor Gilman, the entire town of Stillwater gathered outside his cottage. And inside, the old professor, trembling and bewildered and yet strangely happy, bowed his shoulders while the ambassador slipped over them the broad green scarf and upon his only frock coat pinned the diamond sunburst. In woeful embarrassment Doctor Gilman smiled and bowed and smiled, and then, as the delighted mayor of Stillwater shouted, "Speech," in sudden panic he reached out his hand quickly and covertly, and found the hand of his wife.

"Now, then, three Long ones!" yelled the cheer leader. "Now, then, 'See the Conquering Hero!'" yelled the bandmaster. "Attention! Present arms!" yelled the militia captain; and the townspeople and the professors applauded and waved their hats and handkerchiefs. And Doctor Gilman and his wife, he frightened and confused, she happy and proud, and taking it all as a matter of course, stood arm in arm in the frame of honeysuckles and bowed and bowed and bowed. And the ambassador so far unbent as to drink champagne, which appeared mysteriously in tubs of ice from the rear of the ivy-covered cottage, with the mayor, with the wives of the professors, with the students, with the bandmaster. Indeed, so often did he unbend that when the perfectly new automobile conveyed him back to the Touraine, he was sleeping happily and smiling in his sleep.

Peter had arrived in America at the same time as had the insignia, but Hines and Stetson would not let him show himself in Stillwater. They were afraid if all three conspirators foregathered they might inadvertently drop some clew that would lead to suspicion and discovery.

So Peter worked from New York, and his first act was anonymously to supply his father and Chancellor Black with All the newspaper accounts of the great celebration at Stillwater. When Doctor black read them he choked. Never before had Stillwater College been brought so prominently before the public, and never before had her president been so utterly and completely ignored. And what made it worse was that he recognized that even had he been present he could not have shown his face. How could he, who had, as every one connected with the college now knew, out of spite and without cause, dismissed an old and faithful servant, join in chanting his praises. He only hoped his patron, Hallowell senior, might not hear of Gilman's triumph. But Hallowell senior heard little of anything else. At his office, at his clubs, on the golf-links, every one he met congratulated him on the high and peculiar distinction that had come to his pet college.

"You certainly have the darnedest luck in backing the right horse," exclaimed a rival pork-packer enviously. "Now if I pay a hundred thousand for a Velasquez it turns out to be a bad copy worth thirty dollars, but you pay a professor three thousand and he brings you in half a million dollars' worth of free advertising. Why, this Doctor Gilman's doing as much for your college as Doctor Osler did for Johns Hopkins or as Walter Camp does for Yale."

Mr. Hallowell received these Congratulations as gracefully as he was able, and in secret raged at Chancellor Black. Each day his rage increased. It seemed as though there would never be an end to Doctor Gilman. The stone he had rejected had become the corner-stone of Stillwater. Whenever he opened a newspaper he felt like exclaiming: "Will no one rid me of this pestilent fellow?" For the "Rise and Fall," in an edition deluxe limited to two hundred copies, was being bought up by all his book-collecting millionaire friends; a popular edition was on view in the windows of every book-shop; It was offered as a prize to subscribers to all the more sedate magazines, and the name and features of the distinguished author had become famous and familiar. Not a day passed but that some new honor, at least so the newspapers stated, was thrust upon him. Paragraphs announced that he was to be the next exchange professor to Berlin; that in May he was to lecture at the Sorbonne; that in June he was to receive a degree from Oxford.

A fresh-water college on one of the Great Lakes leaped to the front by offering him the chair of history at that seat of learning at a salary of five thousand dollars a year. Some of the honors that had been thrust upon Doctor Gilman existed only in the imagination of Peter and Stetson, but this offer happened to be genuine.

"Doctor Gilman rejected it without consideration. He read the letter from the trustees to his wife and shook his head.

"We could not be happy away from Stillwater," he said. "We have only a month more in the cottage, but after that we still can walk past it; we can look into the garden and see the flowers she planted. We can visit the place where she lies. But if we went away we should be lonely and miserable for her, and she would be lonely for us."

Mr. Hallowell could not know why Doctor Gilman had refused to leave Stillwater; but when he read that the small Eastern college at which Doctor Gilman had graduated had offered to make him its president, his jealousy knew no bounds.

He telegraphed to Black: "Reinstate Gilman at once; offer him six thousand—offer him whatever he wants, but make him promise for no consideration to leave Stillwater he is only member faculty ever brought any credit to the college if we lose him I'll hold you responsible."

The next morning, hat in hand, smiling ingratiatingly, the Chancellor called upon Doctor Gilman and ate so much humble pie that for a week he suffered acute mental indigestion. But little did Hallowell senior care for that. He had got what he wanted. Doctor Gilman, the distinguished, was back in the faculty, and had made only one condition—that he might live until he died in the ivy-covered cottage.

Two weeks later, when Peter arrived at Stillwater to take the history examination, which, should he pass it, would give him his degree, he found on every side evidences of the "worldwide fame" he himself had created. The newsstand at the depot, the book-stores, the drugstores, the picture-shops, all spoke of Doctor Gilman; and postcards showing the ivy-covered cottage, photographs and enlargements of Doctor Gilman, advertisements of the different editions of "the" history proclaimed his fame. Peter, fascinated by the success of his own handiwork, approached the ivy-covered cottage in a spirit almost of awe. But Mrs. Gilman welcomed him with the same kindly, sympathetic smile with which she always gave courage to the unhappy ones coming up for examinations, and Doctor Gilman's high honors in no way had spoiled his gentle courtesy.

The examination was in writing, and when Peter had handed in his papers Doctor Gilman asked him if he would prefer at once to know the result.

"I should indeed!" Peter assured him.

"Then I regret to tell you, Hallowell," said the professor, "that you have not passed. I cannot possibly give you a mark higher than five." In real sympathy the sage of Stillwater raised his eyes, but to his great astonishment he found that Peter, so far from being cast down or taking offense, was smiling delightedly, much as a fond parent might smile upon the precocious act of a beloved child.

"I am afraid," said Doctor Gilman gently, "that this summer you did not work very hard for your degree!"

Peter Laughed and picked up his hat.

"To tell you the truth, Professor," he said, "you're right I got working for something worth while—and I forgot about the degree."



Chapter 3. THE INVASION OF ENGLAND

This is the true inside story of the invasion of England in 1911 by the Germans, and why it failed. I got my data from Baron von Gottlieb, at the time military attache of the German Government with the Russian army in the second Russian-Japanese War, when Russia drove Japan out of Manchuria, and reduced her to a third-rate power. He told me of his part in the invasion as we sat, after the bombardment of Tokio, on the ramparts of the Emperor's palace, watching the walls of the paper houses below us glowing and smoking like the ashes of a prairie fire.

Two years before, at the time of the invasion, von Gottlieb had been Carl Schultz, the head-waiter at the East Cliff Hotel at Cromer, and a spy.

The other end of the story came to me through Lester Ford, the London correspondent of the New York Republic. They gave me permission to tell it in any fashion I pleased, and it is here set down for the first time.

In telling the story, my conscience is not in the least disturbed, for I have yet to find any one who will believe it.

What led directly to the invasion was that some week-end guest of the East Cliff Hotel left a copy of "The Riddle of the Sands" in the coffee-room, where von Gottlieb found it; and the fact that Ford attended the Shakespeare Ball. Had neither of these events taken place, the German flag might now be flying over Buckingham Palace. And, then again, it might not.

As every German knows, "The Riddle of the Sands" is a novel written by a very clever Englishman in which is disclosed a plan for the invasion of his country. According to this plan an army of infantry was to be embarked in lighters, towed by shallow-draft, sea-going tugs, and despatched simultaneously from the seven rivers that form the Frisian Isles. From there they were to be convoyed by battle-ships two hundred and forty miles through the North Sea, and thrown upon the coast of Norfolk somewhere between the Wash and Mundesley. The fact that this coast is low-lying and bordered by sand flats which at low water are dry, that England maintains no North Sea squadron, and that her nearest naval base is at Chatham, seem to point to it as the spot best adapted for such a raid.

What von Gottlieb thought was evidenced by the fact that as soon as he read the book he mailed it to the German Ambassador in London, and under separate cover sent him a letter. In this he said: "I suggest your Excellency bring this book to the notice of a certain royal personage, and of the Strategy Board. General Bolivar said, 'When you want arms, take them from the enemy.' Does not this also follow when you want ideas?"

What the Strategy Board thought of the plan is a matter of history. This was in 1910. A year later, during the coronation week, Lester Ford went to Clarkson's to rent a monk's robe in which to appear at the Shakespeare Ball, and while the assistant departed in search of the robe, Ford was left alone in a small room hung with full-length mirrors and shelves, and packed with the uniforms that Clarkson rents for Covent Garden balls and amateur theatricals. While waiting, Ford gratified a long, secretly cherished desire to behold himself as a military man, by trying on all the uniforms on the lower shelves; and as a result, when the assistant returned, instead of finding a young American in English clothes and a high hat, he was confronted by a German officer in a spiked helmet fighting a duel with himself in the mirror. The assistant retreated precipitately, and Ford, conscious that he appeared ridiculous, tried to turn the tables by saying, "Does a German uniform always affect a Territorial like that?"

The assistant laughed good-naturedly.

"It did give me quite a turn," he said. "It's this talk of invasion, I fancy. But for a fact, sir, if I was a Coast Guard, and you came along the beach dressed like that, I'd take a shot at you, just on the chance, anyway."

"And, quite right, too!" said Ford.

He was wondering when the invasion did come whether he would stick at his post in London and dutifully forward the news to his paper, or play truant and as a war correspondent watch the news in the making. So the words of Mr. Clarkson's assistant did not sink in. But a few weeks later young Major Bellew recalled them. Bellew was giving a dinner on the terrace of the Savoy Restaurant. His guests were his nephew, young Herbert, who was only five years younger than his uncle, and Herbert's friend Birrell, an Irishman, both in their third term at the university. After five years' service in India, Bellew had spent the last "Eights" week at Oxford, and was complaining bitterly that since his day the undergraduate had deteriorated. He had found him serious, given to study, far too well behaved. Instead of Jorrocks, he read Galsworthy; instead of "wines" he found pleasure in debating clubs where he discussed socialism. Ragging, practical jokes, ingenious hoaxes, that once were wont to set England in a roar, were a lost art. His undergraduate guests combated these charges fiercely. His criticisms they declared unjust and without intelligence.

"You're talking rot!" said his dutiful nephew. "Take Phil here, for example. I've roomed with him three years and I can testify that he has never opened a book. He never heard of Galsworthy until you spoke of him. And you can see for yourself his table manners are quite as bad as yours!"

"Worse!" assented Birrell loyally.

"And as for ragging! What rags, in your day, were as good as ours; as the Carrie Nation rag, for instance, when five hundred people sat through a temperance lecture and never guessed they were listening to a man from Balliol?"

"And the Abyssinian Ambassador rag!" cried Herbert. "What price that? When the DREADNOUGHT manned the yards for him and gave him seventeen guns. That was an Oxford rag, and carried through by Oxford men. The country hasn't stopped laughing yet. You give us a rag!" challenged Herbert. "Make it as hard as you like; something risky, something that will make the country sit up, something that will send us all to jail, and Phil and I will put it through whether it takes one man or a dozen. Go on," he persisted, "And I bet we can get fifty volunteers right here in town and all of them undergraduates."

"Give you the idea, yes!" mocked Bellew, trying to gain time. "That's just what I say. You boys to-day are so dull. You lack initiative. It's the idea that counts. Anybody can do the acting. That's just amateur theatricals!"

"Is it!" snorted Herbert. "If you want to know what stage fright is, just go on board a British battle-ship with your face covered with burnt cork and insist on being treated like an ambassador. You'll find it's a little different from a first night with the Simla Thespians!"

Ford had no part in the debate. He had been smoking comfortably and with well-timed nods, impartially encouraging each disputant. But now he suddenly laid his cigar upon his plate, and, after glancing quickly about him, leaned eagerly forward. They were at the corner table of the terrace, and, as it was now past nine o'clock, the other diners had departed to the theatres and they were quite alone. Below them, outside the open windows, were the trees of the embankment, and beyond, the Thames, blocked to the west by the great shadows of the Houses of Parliament, lit only by the flame in the tower that showed the Lower House was still sitting.

"I'LL give you an idea for a rag," whispered Ford. "One that is risky, that will make the country sit up, that ought to land you in Jail? Have you read 'The Riddle of the Sands'?"

Bellew and Herbert nodded; Birrell made no sign.

"Don't mind him," exclaimed Herbert impatiently. "HE never reads anything! Go on!"

"It's the book most talked about," explained Ford. "And what else is most talked about?" He answered his own question. "The landing of the Germans in Morocco and the chance of war. Now, I ask you, with that book in everybody's mind, and the war scare in everybody's mind, what would happen if German soldiers appeared to-night on the Norfolk coast just where the book says they will appear? Not one soldier, but dozens of soldiers; not in one place, but in twenty places?"

"What would happen?" roared Major Bellew loyally. "The Boy Scouts would fall out of bed and kick them into the sea!"

"Shut up!" snapped his nephew irreverently. He shook Ford by the arm. "How?" he demanded breathlessly. "How are we to do it? It would take hundreds of men."

"Two men," corrected Ford, "And a third man to drive the car. I thought it out one day at Clarkson's when I came across a lot of German uniforms. I thought of it as a newspaper story, as a trick to find out how prepared you people are to meet invasion. And when you said just now that you wanted a chance to go to jail—"

"What's your plan?" interrupted Birrell.

"We would start just before dawn—" began Ford.

"We?" demanded Herbert. "Are you in this?"

"Am I in it?" cried Ford indignantly. "It's my own private invasion! I'm letting you boys in on the ground floor. If I don't go, there won t be any invasion!"

The two pink-cheeked youths glanced at each other inquiringly and then nodded.

"We accept your services, sir," said Birrell gravely. "What's your plan?"

In astonishment Major Bellew glanced from one to the other and then slapped the table with his open palm. His voice shook with righteous indignation.

"Of all the preposterous, outrageous—Are you mad?" he demanded. "Do you suppose for one minute I will allow—"

His nephew shrugged his shoulders and, rising, pushed back his chair.

"Oh, you go to the devil!" he exclaimed cheerfully. "Come on, Ford," he said. "We'll find some place where uncle can't hear us."

Two days later a touring car carrying three young men, in the twenty-one miles between Wells and Cromer, broke down eleven times. Each time this misfortune befell them one young man scattered tools in the road and on his knees hammered ostentatiously at the tin hood; and the other two occupants of the car sauntered to the beach. There they chucked pebbles at the waves and then slowly retraced their steps. Each time the route by which they returned was different from the one by which they had set forth. Sometimes they followed the beaten path down the cliff or, as it chanced to be, across the marshes; sometimes they slid down the face of the cliff; sometimes they lost themselves behind the hedges and in the lanes of the villages. But when they again reached the car the procedure of each was alike—each produced a pencil and on the face of his "Half Inch" road map traced strange, fantastic signs.

At lunch-time they stopped at the East Cliff Hotel at Cromer and made numerous and trivial inquiries about the Cromer golf links. They had come, they volunteered, from Ely for a day of sea-bathing and golf; they were returning after dinner. The head-waiter of the East Cliff Hotel gave them the information they desired. He was an intelligent head-waiter, young, and of pleasant, not to say distinguished, bearing. In a frock coat he might easily have been mistaken for something even more important than a head-waiter—for a German riding-master, a leader of a Hungarian band, a manager of a Ritz hotel. But he was not above his station. He even assisted the porter in carrying the coats and golf bags of the gentlemen from the car to the coffee-room where, with the intuition of the homing pigeon, the three strangers had, unaided, found their way. As Carl Schultz followed, carrying the dust-coats, a road map fell from the pocket of one of them to the floor. Carl Schultz picked it up, and was about to replace it, when his eyes were held by notes scrawled roughly in pencil. With an expression that no longer was that of a head-waiter, Carl cast one swift glance about him and then slipped into the empty coat-room and locked the door. Five minutes later, with a smile that played uneasily over a face grown gray with anxiety, Carl presented the map to the tallest of the three strangers. It was open so that the pencil marks were most obvious. By his accent it was evident the tallest of the three strangers was an American.

"What the devil!" he protested; "which of you boys has been playing hob with my map?"

For just an instant the two pink-cheeked ones regarded him with disfavor; until, for just an instant, his eyebrows rose and, with a glance, he signified the waiter.

"Oh, that!" exclaimed the younger one. "The Automobile Club asked us to mark down petrol stations. Those marks mean that's where you can buy petrol."

The head-waiter breathed deeply. With an assured and happy countenance, he departed and, for the two-hundredth time that day, looked from the windows of the dining-room out over the tumbling breakers to the gray stretch of sea. As though fearful that his face would expose his secret, he glanced carefully about him and then, assured he was alone, leaned eagerly forward, scanning the empty, tossing waters.

In his mind's eye he beheld rolling tug-boats straining against long lines of scows, against the dead weight of field-guns, against the pull of thousands of motionless, silent figures, each in khaki, each in a black leather helmet, each with one hundred and fifty rounds.

In his own language Carl Schultz reproved himself.

"Patience," he muttered; "patience! By ten to-night all will be dark. There will be no stars. There will be no moon. The very heavens fight for us, and by sunrise our outposts will be twenty miles inland!"

At lunch-time Carl Schultz carefully, obsequiously waited upon the three strangers. He gave them their choice of soup, thick or clear, of gooseberry pie or Half-Pay pudding. He accepted their shillings gratefully, and when they departed for the links he bowed them on their way. And as their car turned up Jetty Street, for one instant, he again allowed his eyes to sweep the dull gray ocean. Brown-sailed fishing-boats were beating in toward Cromer. On the horizon line a Norwegian tramp was drawing a lengthening scarf of smoke. Save for these the sea was empty.

By gracious permission of the manageress Carl had obtained an afternoon off, and, changing his coat, he mounted his bicycle and set forth toward Overstrand. On his way he nodded to the local constable, to the postman on his rounds, to the driver of the char a banc. He had been a year in Cromer and was well known and well liked.

Three miles from Cromer, at the top of the highest hill in Overstrand, the chimneys of a house showed above a thick tangle of fir-trees. Between the trees and the road rose a wall, high, compact, forbidding. Carl opened the gate in the wall and pushed his bicycle up a winding path hemmed in by bushes. At the sound of his feet on the gravel the bushes new apart, and a man sprang into the walk and confronted him. But, at sight of the head-waiter, the legs of the man became rigid, his heels clicked together, his hand went sharply to his visor.

Behind the house, surrounded on every side by trees, was a tiny lawn. In the centre of the lawn, where once had been a tennis court, there now stood a slim mast. From this mast dangled tiny wires that ran to a kitchen table. On the table, its brass work shining in the sun, was a new and perfectly good wireless outfit, and beside it, with his hand on the key, was a heavily built, heavily bearded German. In his turn, Carl drew his legs together, his heels clicked, his hand stuck to his visor.

"I have been in constant communication," said the man with the beard. "They will be here just before the dawn. Return to Cromer and openly from the post-office telegraph your cousin in London: 'Will meet you to-morrow at the Crystal Palace.' On receipt of that, in the last edition of all of this afternoon's papers, he will insert the final advertisement. Thirty thousand of our own people will read it. They will know the moment has come!"

As Carl coasted back to Cromer he flashed past many pretty gardens where, upon the lawns, men in flannels were busy at tennis or, with pretty ladies, deeply occupied in drinking tea. Carl smiled grimly. High above him on the sky-line of the cliff he saw the three strangers he had served at luncheon. They were driving before them three innocuous golf balls.

"A nation of wasters," muttered the German, "sleeping at their posts. They are fiddling while England falls!"

Mr. Shutliffe, of Stiffkey, had led his cow in from the marsh, and was about to close the cow-barn door, when three soldiers appeared suddenly around the wall of the village church. They ran directly toward him. It was nine o'clock, but the twilight still held. The uniforms the men wore were unfamiliar, but in his day Mr. Shutliffe had seen many uniforms, and to him all uniforms looked alike. The tallest soldier snapped at Mr. Shutliffe fiercely in a strange tongue.

"Du bist gefangen!" he announced. "Das Dorf ist besetzt. Wo sind unsere Leute?" he demanded.

"You'll 'ave to excuse me, sir," said Mr. Shutliffe, "but I am a trifle 'ard of 'earing."

The soldier addressed him in English.

"What is the name of this village?" he demanded.

Mr. Shuttiffe, having lived in the village upward of eighty years, recalled its name with difficulty.

"Have you seen any of our people?"

With another painful effort of memory Mr. Shutliffe shook his head.

"Go indoors!" commanded the soldier, "And put out all lights, and remain indoors. We have taken this village. We are Germans. You are a prisoner! Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir, thank'ee, sir, kindly," stammered Mr. Shutliffe. "May I lock in the pigs first, sir?"

One of the soldiers coughed explosively, and ran away, and the two others trotted after him. When they looked back, Mr. Shutliffe was still standing uncertainly in the dusk, mildly concerned as to whether he should lock up the pigs or obey the German gentleman.

The three soldiers halted behind the church wall.

"That was a fine start!" mocked Herbert. "Of course, you had to pick out the Village Idiot. If they are all going to take it like that, we had better pack up and go home."

"The village inn is still open," said Ford. "We'll close It."

They entered with fixed bayonets and dropped the butts of their rifles on the sanded floor. A man in gaiters choked over his ale and two fishermen removed their clay pipes and stared. The bar-maid alone arose to the occasion.

"Now, then," she exclaimed briskly, "What way is that to come tumbling into a respectable place? None of your tea-garden tricks in here, young fellow, my lad, or—"

The tallest of the three intruders, in deep guttural accents, interrupted her sharply.

"We are Germans!" he declared. "This village is captured. You are prisoners of war. Those lights you will out put, and yourselves lock in. If you into the street go, we will shoot!"

He gave a command in a strange language; so strange, indeed, that the soldiers with him failed to entirely grasp his meaning, and one shouldered his rifle, while the other brought his politely to a salute.

"You ass!" muttered the tall German. "Get out!"

As they charged into the street, they heard behind them a wild feminine shriek, then a crash of pottery and glass, then silence, and an instant later the Ship Inn was buried in darkness.

"That will hold Stiffkey for a while!" said Ford. "Now, back to the car."

But between them and the car loomed suddenly a tall and impressive figure. His helmet and his measured tread upon the deserted cobble-stones proclaimed his calling.

"The constable!" whispered Herbert. "He must see us, but he mustn't speak to us."

For a moment the three men showed themselves in the middle of the street, and then, as though at sight of the policeman they had taken alarm, disappeared through an opening between two houses. Five minutes later a motor-car, with its canvas top concealing its occupants, rode slowly into Stiffkey's main street and halted before the constable. The driver of the car wore a leather skull-cap and goggles. From his neck to his heels he was covered by a raincoat.

"Mr. Policeman," he began; "when I turned in here three soldiers stepped in front of my car and pointed rifles at me. Then they ran off toward the beach. What's the idea—manoeuvres? Because, they've no right to—"

"Yes, sir," the policeman assured him promptly; "I saw them. It's manoeuvres, sir. Territorials."

"They didn't look like Territorials," objected the chauffeur. "They looked like Germans."

Protected by the deepening dusk, the constable made no effort to conceal a grin.

"Just Territorials, sir," he protested soothingly; "skylarking maybe, but meaning no harm. Still, I'll have a look round, and warn 'em."

A voice from beneath the canvas broke in angrily:

"I tell you, they were Germans. It's either a silly joke, or it's serious, and you ought to report it. It's your duty to warn the Coast Guard."

The constable considered deeply.

"I wouldn't take it on myself to wake the Coast Guard," he protested; "not at this time of the night. But if any Germans' been annoying you, gentlemen, and you wish to lodge a complaint against them, you give me your cards—"

"Ye gods!" cried the man in the rear of the car. "Go on!" he commanded.

As the car sped out of Stiffkey, Herbert exclaimed with disgust:

"What's the use!" he protested. "You couldn't wake these people with dynamite! I vote we chuck it and go home."

"They little know of England who only Stiffkey know," chanted the chauffeur reprovingly. "Why, we haven't begun yet. Wait till we meet a live wire!"

Two miles farther along the road to Cromer, young Bradshaw, the job-master's son at Blakeney, was leading his bicycle up the hill. Ahead of him something heavy flopped from the bank into the road—and in the light of his acetylene lamp he saw a soldier. The soldier dodged across the road and scrambled through the hedge on the bank opposite. He was followed by another soldier, and then by a third. The last man halted.

"Put out that light," he commanded. "Go to your home and tell no one what you have seen. If you attempt to give an alarm you will be shot. Our sentries are placed every fifty yards along this road."

The soldier disappeared from in front of the ray of light and followed his comrades, and an instant later young Bradshaw heard them sliding over the cliff's edge and the pebbles clattering to the beach below. Young Bradshaw stood quite still. In his heart was much fear—fear of laughter, of ridicule, of failure. But of no other kind of fear. Softly, silently he turned his bicycle so that it faced down the long hill he had just climbed. Then he snapped off the light. He had been reliably informed that in ambush at every fifty yards along the road to Blakeney, sentries were waiting to fire on him. And he proposed to run the gauntlet. He saw that it was for this moment that, first as a volunteer and later as a Territorial, he had drilled in the town hall, practiced on the rifle range, and in mixed manoeuvres slept in six inches of mud. As he threw his leg across his bicycle, Herbert, from the motor-car farther up the hill, fired two shots over his head. These, he explained to Ford, were intended to give "verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." And the sighing of the bullets gave young Bradshaw exactly what he wanted—the assurance that he was not the victim of a practical joke. He threw his weight forward and, lifting his feet, coasted downhill at forty miles an hour into the main street of Blakeney. Ten minutes later, when the car followed, a mob of men so completely blocked the water-front that Ford was forced to stop. His head-lights illuminated hundreds of faces, anxious, sceptical, eager. A gentleman with a white mustache and a look of a retired army officer pushed his way toward Ford, the crowd making room for him, and then closing in his wake.

"Have you seen any—any soldiers?" he demanded.

"German soldiers!" Ford answered. "They tried to catch us, but when I saw who they were, I ran through them to warn you. They fired and—"

"How many—and where?"

"A half-company at Stiffkey and a half-mile farther on a regiment. We didn't know then they were Germans, not until they stopped us. You'd better telephone the garrison, and—"

"Thank you!" snapped the elderly gentleman. "I happen to be in command of this district. What are your names?"

Ford pushed the car forward, parting the crowd.

"I've no time for that!" he called. "We've got to warn every coast town in Norfolk. You take my tip and get London on the long distance!"

As they ran through the night Ford spoke over his shoulder.

"We've got them guessing," he said. "Now, what we want is a live wire, some one with imagination, some one with authority who will wake the countryside."

"Looks ahead there," said Birrell, "as though it hadn't gone to bed."

Before them, as on a Mafeking night, every window in Cley shone with lights. In the main street were fishermen, shopkeepers, "trippers" in flannels, summer residents. The women had turned out as though to witness a display of fireworks. Girls were clinging to the arms of their escorts, shivering in delighted terror. The proprietor of the Red Lion sprang in front of the car and waved his arms.

"What's this tale about Germans?" he demanded jocularly.

"You can see their lights from the beach," said Ford. "They've landed two regiments between here and Wells. Stiffkey is taken, and they've cut all the wires south."

The proprietor refused to be "had."

"Let 'em all come!" he mocked.

"All right," returned Ford. "Let 'em come, but don't take it lying down! Get those women off the streets, and go down to the beach, and drive the Germans back! Gangway," he shouted, and the car shot forward. "We warned you," he called, "And it's up to you to—"

His words were lost in the distance. But behind him a man's voice rose with a roar like a rocket and was met with a savage, deep-throated cheer.

Outside the village Ford brought the car to a halt and swung in his seat.

"This thing is going to fail!" he cried petulantly. "They don't believe us. We've got to show ourselves—many times—in a dozen places."

"The British mind moves slowly," said Birrell, the Irishman. "Now, if this had happened in my native land—"

He was interrupted by the screech of a siren, and a demon car that spurned the road, that splattered them with pebbles, tore past and disappeared in the darkness. As it fled down the lane of their head-lights, they saw that men in khaki clung to its sides, were packed in its tonneau, were swaying from its running boards. Before they could find their voices a motor cycle, driven as though the angel of death were at the wheel, shaved their mud-guard and, in its turn, vanished into the night.

"Things are looking up!" said Ford. "Where is our next stop? As I said before, what we want is a live one."

Herbert pressed his electric torch against his road map.

"We are next billed to appear," he said, "about a quarter of a mile from here, at the signal-tower of the Great Eastern Railroad, where we visit the night telegraph operator and give him the surprise party of his life."

The three men had mounted the steps of the signal-tower so quietly that, when the operator heard them, they already surrounded him. He saw three German soldiers with fierce upturned mustaches, with flat, squat helmets, with long brown rifles. They saw an anaemic, pale-faced youth without a coat or collar, for the night was warm, who sank back limply in his chair and gazed speechless with wide-bulging eyes.

In harsh, guttural tones Ford addressed him. "You are a prisoner," he said. "We take over this office in the name of the German Emperor. Get out!"

As though instinctively seeking his only weapon of defence, the hand of the boy operator moved across the table to the key of his instrument. Ford flung his rifle upon it.

"No, you don't!" he growled. "Get out!"

With eyes still bulging, the boy lifted himself into a sitting posture.

"My pay—my month's pay?" he stammered. "Can I take It?"

The expression on the face of the conqueror relaxed.

"Take it and get out," Ford commanded.

With eyes still fixed in fascinated terror upon the invader, the boy pulled open the drawer of the table before him and fumbled with the papers inside.

"Quick!" cried Ford.

The boy was very quick. His hand leaped from the drawer like a snake, and Ford found himself looking into a revolver of the largest calibre issued by a civilized people. Birrell fell upon the boy's shoulders, Herbert twisted the gun from his fingers and hurled it through the window, and almost as quickly hurled himself down the steps of the tower. Birrell leaped after him. Ford remained only long enough to shout: "Don't touch that instrument! If you attempt to send a message through, we will shoot. We go to cut the wires!"

For a minute, the boy in the tower sat rigid, his ears strained, his heart beating in sharp, suffocating stabs. Then, with his left arm raised to guard his face, he sank to his knees and, leaning forward across the table, inviting as he believed his death, he opened the circuit and through the night flashed out a warning to his people.

When they had taken their places in the car, Herbert touched Ford on the shoulder.

"Your last remark," he said, "was that what we wanted was a live one."

"Don't mention it!" said Ford. "He jammed that gun half down my throat. I can taste it still. Where do we go from here?"

"According to the route we mapped out this afternoon," said Herbert, "We are now scheduled to give exhibitions at the coast towns of Salthouse and Weybourne, but—"

"Not with me!" exclaimed Birrell fiercely. "Those towns have been tipped off by now by Blakeney and Cley, and the Boy Scouts would club us to death. I vote we take the back roads to Morston, and drop in on a lonely Coast Guard. If a Coast Guard sees us, the authorities will have to believe him, and they'll call out the navy."

Herbert consulted his map.

"There is a Coast Guard," he said, "stationed just the other side of Morston. And," he added fervently, "let us hope he's lonely."

They lost their way in the back roads, and when they again reached the coast an hour had passed. It was now quite dark. There were no stars, nor moon, but after they had left the car in a side lane and had stepped out upon the cliff, they saw for miles along the coast great beacon fires burning fiercely.

Herbert came to an abrupt halt.

"Since seeing those fires," he explained, "I feel a strange reluctance about showing myself in this uniform to a Coast Guard."

"Coast Guards don't shoot!" mocked Birrell. "They only look at the clouds through a telescope. Three Germans with rifles ought to be able to frighten one Coast Guard with a telescope."

The whitewashed cabin of the Coast Guard was perched on the edge of the cliff. Behind it the downs ran back to meet the road. The door of the cabin was open and from it a shaft of light cut across a tiny garden and showed the white fence and the walk of shells.

"We must pass in single file in front of that light," whispered Ford, "And then, after we are sure he has seen us, we must run like the devil!"

"I'm on in that last scene," growled Herbert.

"Only," repeated Ford with emphasis, "We must be sure he has seen us."

Not twenty feet from them came a bursting roar, a flash, many roars, many flashes, many bullets.

"He's seen us!" yelled Birrell.

After the light from his open door had shown him one German soldier fully armed, the Coast Guard had seen nothing further. But judging from the shrieks of terror and the sounds of falling bodies that followed his first shot, he was convinced he was hemmed in by an army, and he proceeded to sell his life dearly. Clip after clip of cartridges he emptied into the night, now to the front, now to the rear, now out to sea, now at his own shadow in the lamp-light. To the people a quarter of a mile away at Morston it sounded like a battle.

After running half a mile, Ford, bruised and breathless, fell at full length on the grass beside the car. Near it, tearing from his person the last vestiges of a German uniform, he found Birrell. He also was puffing painfully.

"What happened to Herbert?" panted Ford.

"I don't know," gasped Birrell, "When I saw him last he was diving over the cliff into the sea. How many times did you die?"

"About twenty!" groaned the American, "And, besides being dead, I am severely wounded. Every time he fired, I fell on my face, and each time I hit a rock!"

A scarecrow of a figure appeared suddenly in the rays of the head-lights. It was Herbert, scratched, bleeding, dripping with water, and clad simply in a shirt and trousers. He dragged out his kit bag and fell into his golf clothes.

"Anybody who wants a perfectly good German uniform," he cried, "can have mine. I left it in the first row of breakers. It didn't fit me, anyway."

The other two uniforms were hidden in the seat of the car. The rifles and helmets, to lend color to the invasion, were dropped in the open road, and five minutes later three gentlemen in inconspicuous Harris tweeds, and with golf clubs protruding from every part of their car, turned into the shore road to Cromer. What they saw brought swift terror to their guilty souls and the car to an abrupt halt. Before them was a regiment of regulars advancing in column of fours, at the "double." An officer sprang to the front of the car and seated himself beside Ford.

"I'll have to commandeer this," he said. "Run back to Cromer. Don't crush my men, but go like the devil!"

"We heard firing here," explained the officer at the Coast Guard station. "The Guard drove them back to the sea. He counted over a dozen. They made pretty poor practice, for he isn't wounded, but his gravel walk looks as though some one had drawn a harrow over it. I wonder," exclaimed the officer suddenly, "if you are the three gentlemen who first gave the alarm to Colonel Raglan and then went on to warn the other coast towns. Because, if you are, he wants your names."

Ford considered rapidly. If he gave false names and that fact were discovered, they would be suspected and investigated, and the worst might happen. So he replied that his friends and himself probably were the men to whom the officer referred. He explained they had been returning from Cromer, where they had gone to play golf, when they had been held up by the Germans.

"You were lucky to escape," said the officer "And in keeping on to give warning you were taking chances. If I may say so, we think you behaved extremely well."

Ford could not answer. His guilty conscience shamed him into silence. With his siren shrieking and his horn tooting, he was forcing the car through lanes of armed men. They packed each side of the road. They were banked behind the hedges. Their camp-fires blazed from every hill-top.

"Your regiment seems to have turned out to a man!" exclaimed Ford admiringly.

"MY regiment!" snorted the officer. "You've passed through five regiments already, and there are as many more in the dark places. They're everywhere!" he cried jubilantly.

"And I thought they were only where you see the camp-fires," exclaimed Ford.

"That's what the Germans think," said the officer. "It's working like a clock," he cried happily. "There hasn't been a hitch. As soon as they got your warning to Colonel Raglan, they came down to the coast like a wave, on foot, by trains, by motors, and at nine o'clock the Government took over all the railroads. The county regiments, regulars, yeomanry, territorials, have been spread along this shore for thirty miles. Down in London the Guards started to Dover and Brighton two hours ago. The Automobile Club in the first hour collected two hundred cars and turned them over to the Guards in Bird Cage Walk. Cody and Grahame-White and eight of his air men left Hendon an hour ago to reconnoitre the south coast. Admiral Beatty has started with the Channel Squadron to head off the German convoy in the North Sea, and the torpedo destroyers have been sent to lie outside of Heligoland. We'll get that back by daylight. And on land every one of the three services is under arms. On this coast alone before sunrise we'll have one hundred thousand men, and from Colchester the brigade division of artillery, from Ipswich the R. H. A.'s with siege-guns, field-guns, quick-firing-guns, all kinds of guns spread out over every foot of ground from here to Hunstanton. They thought they'd give us a surprise party. They will never give us another surprise party!"

On the top of the hill at Overstrand, the headwaiter of the East Cliff Hotel and the bearded German stood in the garden back of the house with the forbidding walls. From the road in front came unceasingly the tramp and shuffle of thousands of marching feet, the rumble of heavy cannon, the clanking of their chains, the voices of men trained to command raised in sharp, confident orders. The sky was illuminated by countless fires. Every window of every cottage and hotel blazed with lights. The night had been turned into day. The eyes of the two Germans were like the eyes of those who had passed through an earthquake, of those who looked upon the burning of San Francisco, upon the destruction of Messina.

"We were betrayed, general," whispered the head-waiter.

"We were betrayed, baron," replied the bearded one.

"But you were in time to warn the flotilla."

With a sigh, the older man nodded.

"The last message I received over the wireless," he said, "before I destroyed it, read, 'Your message understood. We are returning. Our movements will be explained as manoeuvres. And," added the general, "The English, having driven us back, will be willing to officially accept that explanation. As manoeuvres, this night will go down into history. Return to the hotel," he commanded, "And in two months you can rejoin your regiment."

On the morning after the invasion the New York Republic published a map of Great Britain that covered three columns and a wood-cut of Ford that was spread over five. Beneath it was printed: "Lester Ford, our London correspondent, captured by the Germans; he escapes and is the first to warn the English people."

On the same morning, In an editorial in The Times of London, appeared this paragraph:

"The Germans were first seen by the Hon. Arthur Herbert, the eldest son of Lord Cinaris; Mr. Patrick Headford Birrell—both of Balliol College, Oxford; and Mr. Lester Ford, the correspondent of the New York Republic. These gentlemen escaped from the landing party that tried to make them prisoners, and at great risk proceeded in their motor-car over roads infested by the Germans to all the coast towns of Norfolk, warning the authorities. Should the war office fail to recognize their services, the people of Great Britain will prove that they are not ungrateful."

A week later three young men sat at dinner on the terrace of the Savoy.

"Shall we, or shall we not," asked Herbert, "tell my uncle that we three, and we three alone, were the invaders?"

"That's hardly correct," said Ford, "as we now know there were two hundred thousand invaders. We were the only three who got ashore."

"I vote we don't tell him," said Birrell. "Let him think with everybody else that the Germans blundered; that an advance party landed too soon and gave the show away. If we talk," he argued, "We'll get credit for a successful hoax. If we keep quiet, everybody will continue to think we saved England. I'm content to let it go at that."



Chapter 4. BLOOD WILL TELL

David Greene was an employee of the Burdett Automatic Punch Company. The manufacturing plant of the company was at Bridgeport, but in the New York offices there were working samples of all the punches, from the little nickel-plated hand punch with which conductors squeezed holes in railroad tickets, to the big punch that could bite into an iron plate as easily as into a piece of pie. David's duty was to explain these different punches, and accordingly when Burdett Senior or one of the sons turned a customer over to David he spoke of him as a salesman. But David called himself a "demonstrator." For a short time he even succeeded in persuading the other salesmen to speak of themselves as demonstrators, but the shipping clerks and bookkeepers laughed them out of it. They could not laugh David out of it. This was so, partly because he had no sense of humor, and partly because he had a great-great-grandfather. Among the salesmen on lower Broadway, to possess a great-great-grandfather is unusual, even a great-grandfather is a rarity, and either is considered superfluous. But to David the possession of a great-great-grandfather was a precious and open delight. He had possessed him only for a short time. Undoubtedly he always had existed, but it was not until David's sister Anne married a doctor in Bordentown, New Jersey, and became socially ambitious, that David emerged as a Son of Washington.

It was sister Anne, anxious to "get in" as a "Daughter" and wear a distaff pin in her shirtwaist, who discovered the revolutionary ancestor. She unearthed him, or rather ran him to earth, in the graveyard of the Presbyterian church at Bordentown. He was no less a person than General Hiram Greene, and he had fought with Washington at Trenton and at Princeton. Of this there was no doubt. That, later, on moving to New York, his descendants became peace-loving salesmen did not affect his record. To enter a society founded on heredity, the important thing is first to catch your ancestor, and having made sure of him, David entered the Society of the Sons of Washington with flying colors. He was not unlike the man who had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it. He was not unlike the other man who woke to find himself famous. He had gone to bed a timid, near-sighted, underpaid salesman without a relative in the world, except a married sister in Bordentown, and he awoke to find he was a direct descendant of "Neck or Nothing" Greene, a revolutionary hero, a friend of Washington, a man whose portrait hung in the State House at Trenton. David's life had lacked color. The day he carried his certificate of membership to the big jewelry store uptown and purchased two rosettes, one for each of his two coats, was the proudest of his life.

The other men in the Broadway office took a different view. As Wyckoff, one of Burdett's flying squadron of travelling salesmen, said, "All grandfathers look alike to me, whether they're great, or great-great-great. Each one is as dead as the other. I'd rather have a live cousin who could loan me a five, or slip me a drink. What did your great-great dad ever do for you?"

"Well, for one thing," said David stiffly, "he fought in the War of the Revolution. He saved us from the shackles of monarchical England; he made it possible for me and you to enjoy the liberties of a free republic."

"Don't try to tell me your grandfather did all that," protested Wyckoff, "because I know better. There were a lot of others helped. I read about it in a book."

"I am not grudging glory to others," returned David; "I am only saying I am proud that I am a descendant of a revolutionist."

Wyckoff dived into his inner pocket and produced a leather photograph frame that folded like a concertina.

"I don't want to be a descendant," he said; "I'd rather be an ancestor. Look at those." Proudly he exhibited photographs of Mrs. Wyckoff with the baby and of three other little Wyckoffs. David looked with envy at the children.

"When I'm married," he stammered, and at the words he blushed, "I hope to be an ancestor."

"If you're thinking of getting married," said Wyckoff, "you'd better hope for a raise in salary."

The other clerks were as unsympathetic as Wyckoff. At first when David showed them his parchment certificate, and his silver gilt insignia with on one side a portrait of Washington, and on the other a Continental soldier, they admitted it was dead swell. They even envied him, not the grandfather, but the fact that owing to that distinguished relative David was constantly receiving beautifully engraved invitations to attend the monthly meetings of the society; to subscribe to a fund to erect monuments on battle-fields to mark neglected graves; to join in joyous excursions to the tomb of Washington or of John Paul Jones; to inspect West Point, Annapolis, and Bunker Hill; to be among those present at the annual "banquet" at Delmonico's. In order that when he opened these letters he might have an audience, he had given the society his office address.

In these communications he was always addressed as "Dear Compatriot," and never did the words fail to give him a thrill. They seemed to lift him out of Burdett's salesrooms and Broadway, and place him next to things uncommercial, untainted, high, and noble. He did not quite know what an aristocrat was, but he believed being a compatriot made him an aristocrat. When customers were rude, when Mr. John or Mr. Robert was overbearing, this idea enabled David to rise above their ill-temper, and he would smile and say to himself: "If they knew the meaning of the blue rosette in my button-hole, how differently they would treat me! How easily with a word could I crush them!"

But few of the customers recognized the significance of the button. They thought it meant that David belonged to the Y. M. C. A. or was a teetotaler. David, with his gentle manners and pale, ascetic face, was liable to give that impression.

When Wyckoff mentioned marriage, the reason David blushed was because, although no one in the office suspected it, he wished to marry the person in whom the office took the greatest pride. This was Miss Emily Anthony, one of Burdett and Sons' youngest, most efficient, and prettiest stenographers, and although David did not cut as dashing a figure as did some of the firm's travelling men, Miss Anthony had found something in him so greatly to admire that she had, out of office hours, accepted his devotion, his theatre tickets, and an engagement ring. Indeed, so far had matters progressed, that it had been almost decided when in a few months they would go upon their vacations they also would go upon their honeymoon. And then a cloud had come between them, and from a quarter from which David had expected only sunshine.

The trouble befell when David discovered he had a great-great-grandfather. With that fact itself Miss Anthony was almost as pleased as was David himself, but while he was content to bask in another's glory, Miss Anthony saw in his inheritance only an incentive to achieve glory for himself.

From a hard-working salesman she had asked but little, but from a descendant of a national hero she expected other things. She was a determined young person, and for David she was an ambitious young person. She found she was dissatisfied. She found she was disappointed. The great-great-grandfather had opened up a new horizon—had, in a way, raised the standard. She was as fond of David as always, but his tales of past wars and battles, his accounts of present banquets at which he sat shoulder to shoulder with men of whom even Burdett and Sons spoke with awe, touched her imagination.

"You shouldn't be content to just wear a button," she urged. "If you're a Son of Washington, you ought to act like one."

"I know I'm not worthy of you," David sighed.

"I don't mean that, and you know I don't," Emily replied indignantly. "It has nothing to do with me! I want you to be worthy of yourself, of your grandpa Hiram!"

"But HOW?" complained David. "What chance has a twenty-five dollar a week clerk—"

It was a year before the Spanish-American War, while the patriots of Cuba were fighting the mother country for their independence.

"If I were a Son of the Revolution," said Emily, "I'd go to Cuba and help free it."

"Don't talk nonsense," cried David. "If I did that I'd lose my job, and we'd never be able to marry. Besides, what's Cuba done for me? All I know about Cuba is, I once smoked a Cuban cigar and it made me ill."

"Did Lafayette talk like that?" demanded Emily. "Did he ask what have the American rebels ever done for me?"

"If I were in Lafayette's class," sighed David, "I wouldn't be selling automatic punches."

"There's your trouble," declared Emily "You lack self-confidence. You're too humble, you've got fighting blood and you ought to keep saying to yourself, 'Blood will tell,' and the first thing you know, it WILL tell! You might begin by going into politics in your ward. Or, you could join the militia. That takes only one night a week, and then, if we DID go to war with Spain, you'd get a commission, and come back a captain!"