xtravagant contours, and the thing she
loves best on earth is to get under a pasteboard crown, with gilt stars
on it, and drape herself in the flag of her country, with one fat arm
bare, while Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and the rest
is gathered about and looking up to her for protection. Mebbe she don't
look so bad as the Goddess of Liberty on a float in the middle of one of
our wide streets when the Chamber of Commerce is giving a Greater Red
Gap pageant; but take her in a hall, where you set close up to the
platform, and she looks more like our boasted liberty has degenerated
into license, or something like that. Anyway, the committee had to
promise her she could do something in her flag and crown and talcum
powder, because they knew she'd knock the show if they didn't.

This reminded 'em they had to have a program of entertainment; so they
got me on the committee with the other Mes-dames to think up things, me
always being an easy mark. I find out right off that we're a lot of
foreigners and you got to be darned careful not to hurt anybody's
feelings. Little Bertha Lehman's pa would let her be a state--Colorado
or Nebraska, or something--but he wouldn't let her sing unless it would
be a German song in the original; and Hobbs, the English baker, said his
Tillie would have to sing "Britannia Rules the Waves," or nothing; and
two or three others said what they would and wouldn't do, and it looked
like Red Gap itself was going to be dug up into trenches. I had to get
little Magnesia Waterman, daughter of the coons that work in the U.S.
Grill, to do the main singing. She seemed to be about the only American
child soprano we had. She sings right well for a kid, mostly these sad
songs about heaven; but we picked out a good live one for her that
seemed to be neutral.

It was delicate work, let me tell you, turning down folks that wanted to
sing patriotic songs or recite war poetry that would be sure to start
something, with Professor Gluckstein wishing to get up and tell how the
cowardly British had left the crew of a German submarine to perish after
shooting it up when it was only trying to sink their cruiser by fair
and lawful methods; and Henry Lehman wanting to read a piece from a
German newspaper about how the United States was a nation of vile
money-grubbers that would sell ammunition to the enemy just because they
had the ships to take it away, and wouldn't sell a dollar's worth to the
Fatherland,