kill the most of another nation in the shortest time. This is the result
of six thousand years of constant civilization. By and by, when the
nations cease to be boys, perhaps they will not want to kill each other
at all. Some people think the world is very old; but here is an evidence
that it is very young, and, in fact, has scarcely yet begun to be a
world. When the volcanoes have done spouting, and the earthquakes are
quaked out, and you can tell what land is going to be solid and keep its
level twenty-four hours, and the swamps are filled up, and the deltas of
the great rivers, like the Mississippi and the Nile, become terra firma,
and men stop killing their fellows in order to get their land and other
property, then perhaps there will be a world that an angel would n't
weep over. Now one half the world are employed in getting ready to
kill the other half, some of them by marching about in uniform, and the
others by hard work to earn money to pay taxes to buy uniforms and guns.

John was not naturally very cruel, and it was probably the love of
display quite as much as of fighting that led him into a military life;
for he, in common with all his comrades, had other traits of the savage.
One of them was the same passion for ornament that induces the African
to wear anklets and bracelets of hide and of metal, and to decorate
himself with tufts of hair, and to tattoo his body. In John's day there
was a rage at school among the boys for wearing bracelets woven of
the hair of the little girls. Some of them were wonderful specimens of
braiding and twist. These were not captured in war, but were sentimental
tokens of friendship given by the young maidens themselves. John's own
hair was kept so short (as became a warrior) that you couldn't have made
a bracelet out of it, or anything except a paintbrush; but the little
girls were not under military law, and they willingly sacrificed their
tresses to decorate the soldiers they esteemed. As the Indian is honored
in proportion to the scalps he can display, at John's school the boy
was held in highest respect who could show the most hair trophies on his
wrist. John himself had a variety that would have pleased a Mohawk, fine
and coarse and of all colors. There were the flaxen, the faded straw,
the glossy black, the lustrous brown, the dirty yellow, the undecided
auburn, and the fiery red. Perhaps his pulse beat more quickly under the
red hair of Cynthia Rudd than on account of al