of goods has a big gun behind it. Of
course we don't need to use the gun--_yet_--because people are
crying for our manufactures all over the world. If we had occupied
your big and half-developed country in your place, we would have
long ago been the only great State. There would have been no others.
We would have annihilated them if they were not willing to become
German provinces."

Rudi took a long pull at his cigarette, with his elbows outspread
like the haughty wings of the Prussian eagles of war. Emitting a
long streamer of smoke, he summed up the whole thing in a nutshell
with a derisory--Pouf!

Kirtley was inwardly fired up with resentment. Then he had to
smother a laugh. This exhibition of the family taken off its guard
was more instructive than volumes of discussion he might read about
the true German attitude toward America--toward everyone. Were these
but Goths with the German skins scratched off a little? He kept
thinking of Anderson--how it furnished the pure evidence of what the
latter was despairing of before deaf ears! Gard's respect, his
sympathy, for the old man, jumped up with patriotic fervor.

He marveled at first how the good Buchers had been primed with this
knowledge, these comparisons. Then he realized that the editorials
and other articles in the Dresden journals, whose lengthy, heavy,
pounding sentences confused with an obtuse, inverted syntax he was
reading at Anderson's suggestion, accounted for these venomous
conceptions and prejudices.

"So it is our duty to hate," broke in the Herr once more, with
croaks and grunts now behind his long porcelain pipe which roved
down over his stomach, a green tassel dangling at the end. "We give
our children beatings to educate them, don't we? So we have the best
education. We must give the world a beating to improve it."

The Frau all the while could hardly restrain herself.

"You know what we in Germany call Americans? We call them
pigs--yes, _pigs_. America is like a big pig pen where everybody is
wallowing over everybody for money--just for money."

"And Germany," added her elder son, "is just waiting till the United
States gets money enough, then we go in with our _navy_ and our
_army_ and take it all."

Gard wanted to see how far they _would_ go, and he had seen. Was
this the old barbarian of the north risen to earth again, his rude
garments of hide torn off, exposing him in his pristine, fighting
nakedness? Where was the German under it