was coming from. He'd
make the place look like a Dutch beer garden and they'd just have to come
from somewhere, because what German ever saw a beer garden that didn't
have people coming to it? I reckoned up that Herman would have enough
custom to make the place pay, the quick rate our country is growing, in
about two hundred and forty-five or fifty years.

So that's Wagner's Sylvan Glen you seen advertised. It's there all right;
and Herman is there, waiting for trade, with a card back of his little
bar that says, in big letters: Keep Smiling! I bet if you dropped in this
minute you'd find him in a black jacket and white apron, with a bill of
fare wrote in purple ink. He thinks people will soon drop in from twenty
miles off to get a cheese sandwich or a dill pickle, or something.

Two of the boys was over this last June when he had his grand opening.
They was the only person there except a man from Surprise Valley that
was looking for stock and got lost. Buck Devine says the place looked
as swell as something you'd see round Chicago.

Herman has a scow on the pond, and a dozen little green tables outside
under the spruce trees, with all the trees white-washed neatly round the
bottoms, and white-washed stones along the driveway, and a rustic gate
with Welcome to Wagner's Sylvan Glen! over it. And he's got some green
tubs with young spruces planted in 'em, standing under the big spruces,
and everything as neat as a pin.

Everyone thinks he's plumb crazy now, even if they didn't when he said
Eloise Plummer was as beautiful as the morning star. But you can't tell.
He's getting money every month from his uncle in Cincinnati to improve
the place. He's sent the uncle a photo of it and it must look good back
in Cincinnati, where you can't see the surrounding country.

Maybe Herman merely wants to lead a quiet life with the German poets, and
has thought up something to make the uncle come through. On the other
hand, mebbe he's a spy. Of course he's got a brain. He's either kidding
the uncle, or else Wagner's Sylvan Glen now covers a concrete gun
foundation.

In either case he's due for harsh words some day--either from the uncle
when he finds there ain't any roadhouse patrons for twenty miles round,
or from the German War Office when they find out there ain't even
anything to shoot at.

The lady paused; then remarked that, even at a church sociable, Uncle
Henry's idee of wine would probably make trouble to a police extent