ranger than that they are luxurious persons who sleep late and knock
off work early.

Waking Jake was one of the most dangerous of his wife's prerogatives.
On this morning, if he had been awaker he would have bitten off the
black hand that reached into his berth and twitched the sheet at seven
of a non-working day. The voice that murmured appealingly through the
curtains, "S'em o'clock, please!" did not please Jake at all.

He cursed his annoying and nudging wife a few times heartily, then
began to make his acutely unbeautiful toilet. In the same small
wheeled hotel capitalists, statesmen, matrons, and misses were
dressing in quarters just as strait. Jake and his wife had always got
in each other's way, but never more cumbersomely than now. Jake found
his wife's stockings when he sought his socks. Her corset-strings
seemed to be everywhere. Whatever he laid hold of brought along her
corset. He thrust his head and arms into something white and came out
of it sputtering:

"That's your damned shimmy. Where's my damned shirt?"

Somehow they made it at last, got dressed and washed somehow and left
the caravansary. Mrs. Nuddle carried the heavier baggage. They had
breakfast at the lunch-counter; then they went out and looked at the
Capitol. It inspired in Jake's heart no national reverence. He said to
his awestruck wife:

"There's where that gang of robbers, the Congersmen, meet and agree
on their hold-ups. They're all the hirelings of the capitalists.

"They voted for this rotten war without consulting the people. They
didn't dare consult 'em. They knew the people wasn't in favor of no
such crime. But the Congersmen get their orders from Wall Street, and
them brokers wanted the war because they owned so much stock that
wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on unless the United States
joined the Allies and collected for 'em off Germany."

It was thus that Jake and his kind regarded the avalanche of
horrific woe that German ambition spilled upon the world and kept
rolling down from the mountain-tops of heaped-up munitions. It was
thus that they contemplated the mangled villages of innocent Belgium,
the slavery-drives in the French towns, the windrows of British
dead, the increasing lust of conquest, which grew by what it fed
on, till at last America, driven frantic by the endless carnage,
took up belatedly the gigantic task of throwing back the avalanche
across the mountain to the other side before it engulfed and