him out."

In an actual rain of perspiration, his tie slid well under one ear,
Abrahm Kantor burst in, mouthing the words before his acute state of
strangulation would let them out.

"Elsass--it's Elsass outside--he--wants--to sign--Leon--fifty
concerts--coast to coast--two thousand--next season--he's got the
papers--already drawn up--the pen outside waiting--"

"Abrahm!"

"Pa!"

In the silence that followed, Isadore Kantor, a poppiness of stare and a
violent redness set in, suddenly turned to his five-year-old son, sticky
with lollypop, and came down soundly and with smack against the
infantile, the slightly outstanding, and unsuspecting ear.

"_Momser!_" he cried. "_Chammer! Lump! Ganef!_ You hear that? Two
thousand! Two thousand! Didn't I tell you--didn't I tell you to
practise?"

Even as Leon Kantor put pen to this princely document, Francis Ferdinand
of Austria, the assassin's bullet true, lay dead in state, and let slip
were the dogs of war.

In the next years, men, forty deep, were to die in piles; hayricks of
fields to become human hayricks of battlefields; Belgium disembowelled,
her very entrails dragging to find all the civilized world her champion,