tures for peace. There was, in actuality, no longer even an English
or a German nation. It was an orgy of homicide, in which the best of
mankind were wantonly destroyed, leaving only the puny, the
feeble-minded, the deformed, and the ineffectual to perpetuate the race.

I

It was three minutes past three postmeridian in the operating room of
the new Wireless Station recently installed at the United States Naval
Observatory at Georgetown. Bill Hood, the afternoon operator, was
sitting in his shirt sleeves with his receivers at his ears, smoking a
corncob pipe and awaiting a call from the flagship _Lincoln_ of the
North Atlantic Patrol with which, somewhere just off Hatteras, he had
been in communication a few moments before. The air was quiet.

Hood was a fat man, and so of course good-natured; but he was serious
about his work and hated all interfering amateurs. Of late these
wireless pests had become particularly obnoxious, as practically
everything was sent out in code and they had nothing with which to
occupy themselves. But it was a hot day and none of them seemed to be at
work. On one side of his desk a tall thermometer indicated that the
temperature of the room was 91 degrees Fahrenheit; on the other a big
clock, connected with some extraneous mechanism by a complicated system
of brass rods and wires, ticked off the minutes and seconds with a
peculiar metallic self-consciousness, as if aware of its own importance
in being the official timepiece, as far as there was an official
timepiece, for the entire United States of America.

Hood from time to time tested his converters and detector, and then
resumed his non-official study of the adventures of a great detective
who pursued the baffling criminal by the aid of all the latest
scientific discoveries. Hood thought it was good stuff, although at the
same time he knew, of course, that it was rot. He was a practical man of
little imagination, and, though the detective did not interest him
particularly, he liked the scientific part of the stories. He was
thrifty, of Scotch-Irish descent, and at two minutes past three had
never had an adventure in his life. At three minutes past three he began
his career as one of the celebrities of the world.

As the minute hand of the official clock dropped into its slot somebody
called the Naval Observatory. The call was so faint as to be barely
audible, in spite of the fact that Hood's instrument was tuned for a
three-th