r tells us, "Jabez smote his brow. 'At last!'
he moaned in deep anguish. 'At last it has come!' Then he turned, and
seizing a large milk bottle he battered the head of Aunt Topsy, crying
the while in the voice of a fanatic, 'For my home town! For my home
town! This is a just reprisal!!!' Then with a last look at the havoc he
had wrought he went out of the house and into the wilderness--"

Pipper's imaginative description ends too abruptly to be really
satisfactory; but one fact about the life of Jabez Puffwater will remain
emblazoned on America's history for time immemorial--that if he had only
possessed the rhetoric of a Proon--the presence of a Hooter--the
education of a Floop--the racial understanding of a Bogtoe and the
mentality of a Snurge--he would not only have proved himself invaluable
to the home constituency of Oggsville, Ken. but have been an entirely
different man altogether.

FURSTIN LIEBERWURST ZU SCHWEINEN-KALBER

[Illustration: GRETCHEN LIEBERWURST ZU SCHWEINEN-KALBER

_From the famous etching by Grobmeyer_]

How strange it seems that she of whom we write is dust and less than
dust below the fertile soil of her so beloved Prussia--Furstin
Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber! Can you not rise from the grave once
more to charm us with the magic of your voice? Are those deep, mellowed
tones, so sonorous and appealing, never to be heard again? Ah, me! Why,
indeed, should such divinity be so short lived? Who could play Juliet as
she could? Nobody! Her enemies laughed and said that her chronic
adenoids utterly destroyed all the beauty of the part. Jealousy! Vile
jealousy! Genius always has that to contend with. Every one has
failings. Gretchen Lieberwurst zu Schweinen-Kalber made of Juliet a
woman--a pulsating, human woman, with failings like the rest of us, the
chief of which happened to be adenoids.[15]

To trace this soul-stirring actress to her obscure birth has indeed been
a labour--but withal, a labour of love! For who could help experiencing
exquisite joy at unearthing trinkets and miniatures and broken memories
of such a radiant being?

Nuremburg, red-roofed and gleaming in the sunlight, was the place
wherein she first saw the light of day. Her father, Peter Schmidt, was
by trade a sausage-moulder, for in those far-off days there was not the
vast machinery of civilisation to wield the good meat into the requisite
shape. Gretchen, when a girl, often used to watch her father as he plied
his