s of engineering.
London, Paris, Berlin, were shapeless, low agglomerations beside it. Its
port reached to its heart like Venice, and, like Venice, it was obvious,
dramatic, and proud. Seen from above it was alive with crawling
trains and cars, and at a thousand points it was already breaking into
quivering light. New York was altogether at its best that evening, its
splendid best.

"Gaw! What a place!" said Bert.

It was so great, and in its collective effect so pacifically
magnificent, that to make war upon it seemed incongruous beyond measure,
like laying siege to the National Gallery or attacking respectable
people in an hotel dining-room with battle-axe and mail. It was in its
entirety so large, so complex, so delicately immense, that to bring it
to the issue of warfare was like driving a crowbar into the mechanism
of a clock. And the fish-like shoal of great airships hovering light
and sunlit above, filling the sky, seemed equally remote from the ugly
forcefulness of war. To Kurt, to Smallways, to I know not how many more
of the people in the air-fleet came the distinctest apprehension of
these incompatibilities. But in the head of the Prince Karl Albert were
the vapours of romance: he was a conqueror, and this was the enemy's
city. The greater the city, the greater the triumph. No doubt he had a
time of tremendous exultation and sensed beyond all precedent the sense
of power that night.

There came an end at last to that pause. Some wireless communications
had failed of a satisfactory ending, and fleet and city remembered they
were hostile powers. "Look!" cried the multitude; "look!"

"What are they doing?"

"What?"... Down through the twilight sank five attacking airships, one
to the Navy Yard on East River, one to City Hall, two over the great
business buildings of Wall Street and Lower Broadway, one to the
Brooklyn Bridge, dropping from among their fellows through the danger
zone from the distant guns smoothly and rapidly to a safe proximity to
the city masses. At that descent all the cars in the streets stopped
with dramatic suddenness, and all the lights that had been coming on in
the streets and houses went out again. For the City Hall had awakened
and was conferring by telephone with the Federal command and taking
measures for defence. The City Hall was asking for airships, refusing to
surrender as Washington advised, and developing into a centre of intense
emotion, of hectic activity. Everywhere and