ard enough. See 'em
march up to fight when there's an invasion! And how they do fight! These
pacifists belie their own construction. They're built on a fight from
the cradle and before that.

"I wish more of their own phagocytes would begin to preach
non-resistance and try to teach great moral lessons to invading germs.
We wouldn't have to listen to so many of 'em. But phagocytes don't act
that way. They keep in training. They don't say, like that poor old
maunderer I read this morning, that there's no use preparing--that a
million phagocytes will spring to arms overnight if their country's
invaded. They keep in trim. They fight quick. If they didn't we wouldn't
be here."

"These phagocytes--is infantry, yes?" demanded Herman Vielhaber. "I
never hear 'em named before like that."

"Infantry, and all the other branches, in a healthy body--and our own
body is healthy. Watch our phagocytes come forward now, just as those
tiny white corpuscles rush through the blood to an invaded spot. You'll
see 'em come quick. Herman, your country has licked Belgium and
Serbia--you can rightly claim that much. But she'll never get another
decision. Too many phagocytes."

Dave Cowan, who always listened attentively to Doctor Purdy for new
words, was thus enabled to enlighten Winona about her own and other
people's phagocytes; and Winona, overwhelmed by his mass of detail--for
Dave had supplemented Purdy's lecture with fuller information from his
encyclopedia--had sighed and said: "Oh, dear! We seem to be living over
a volcano!"

This had caused Dave to become more volubly instructive.

"Of course! Didn't you know that? How thick do you suppose the crust of
the earth is, anyway? All we humans are--we're plants that have grown
out of the cooled crust of a floating volcano; plants that can walk and
talk, but plants just the same. We float round the sun, which is only
another big volcano that hasn't cooled yet--good thing for us it
hasn't--and the sun and us are floating round some other volcano that no
one has discovered yet because the circle is too big, and that one is
probably circling round another one--and there you are. That's plain,
isn't it?"

"Not very," said Winona.

"Well, I admit there's a catch in it I haven't figured out yet, but the
facts are right, as far as I've gone. Anyway, here we are, and we got
here by fighting, and we'll have to keep on fighting, one way or
another, if we're to get any place else."

"I don't