ke home these delicacies. It was right noble or cautious,
or something. And after visiting six or eight of these communities
Genevieve May had quite a stock of these magic delicacies on sale in
different stores and was looking forward to putting the war firmly on
its feet--only she couldn't get many reports of sales from this stock.

Then she got a dandy idea. She would come to the Kulanche County
Fair at Red Gap, assemble all her stock there, give one of these
here demonstrations in economic canning, and auction off the whole
lot with a glad hurrah. She thought mebbe, with her influence, she
might get Secretary Baker, or someone like that, to come out and do
the auctioning--all under the auspices of Mrs. Genevieve May Popper,
whose tireless efforts had done so much to teach the dear old Fatherland
its lesson, and so on. She now had about three hundred jars and bottles
of this stuff after her summer's work, and it looked important.

I got down to the county fair myself last year, having some sure-fire
blue-ribbon stock there, and it was then that I hear G.H. Stultz talking
about this here mother-in-law of his, he taking me aside at their home
one night, so his wife, Lucille, wouldn't hear.

"This respected lady is trying to teach her grandmother how to suck
eggs--no more, no less," he says. "Now she's coming here to pull
something off. You watch her--that's all I ask. Everything that woman
touches goes funny. Look how she poisoned those innocent people up at
that hotel. And I'll bet this canned stuff she's going to sell off will
kill even mere tasters. If she only hadn't come to my town! That woman
don't seem to realize that I'm cursed with a German name and have to be
miles above suspicion.

"Suppose she sells off this stuff! I give you my word she puts things in
it that even a professional canning factory wouldn't dare to. And suppose
it poisons off a lot of our best patriots! Do you think a mob will be
very long blaming me for a hand in it? Why, it'll have me, in no time at
all, reaching my feet down for something solid that has been carefully
removed."

I tried to cheer the man up, but he was scared stiff.

"Mark my words," he says. "She'll pull a bloomer! If that woman could go
into an innocent hotel kitchen, where every care is taken to keep things
right, and poison off twenty-three people till they picked at the covers
and had relatives wondering what might be in their safe-deposit boxes,
think what she'd d