d in all byways, the vivid faces of those who had
sought death freely, each face telling with ghastly eloquence a tale
that had never been told in the life of man, of a race self-destroyed
at a moment, at a word, for a vision which it alone had understood,
leaving its epitaph in the words on the poison vials which a government
machine efficient to the last had supplied--"_Der Tag ist zu uns_"--"The
Day is Ours."

Then through the blenching words that flashed along the closed circle of
steel in all the tongues of Europe, the shrinking thought leaped to our
dumb, numb mind and throbbed upon them like the insistent resounding
clangor of a titanic brazen shield, as if beaten by a grimacing god:

Germany is yours, O sons of men! What now?

* * * * *

I woke at dawn to the boisterous, bold boom of the batteries of Metz.
They seemed to speak in glorious wide-mouthed joy of Til Eulenspiegel
and the young Siegfried.

I thanked God for the Germans.

THE WEAVER WHO CLAD THE SUMMER[11]

BY HARRIS MERTON LYON

From _The Illustrated Sunday Magazine_

[11] Copyright, 1915, by The Illustrated Sunday Magazine. Copyright,
1916, by Harris Merton Lyon.

I had always felt vaguely that there must be at times an intense pathos
which overcame the master-worker in perishable materials--the actor
in his supreme moment; the singer, the musician--I thought--must feel
a bitter regret that his glory cannot live but must die, _in articulo
gloriae_, with the sound, the effect he has created. Bernhardt seemed
to me to have that in the back of her mind when she exulted over her
appearance in the moving pictures. "I am immortal," she cried,
dramatically--always dramatic, that old lady--"I am a film." So thin
a bridge to immortality!

The actor, the singer, the musician; struggling through years and over
obstacles to attain perfection--and then what? A brief triumph in a
perishable art; a transient, fugitive gracing of a day, an hour, a
moment ... and then another forgotten mortal artist. I remembered
Gautier's decision, "The coin outlasts Tiberius." Paint, chisel, then,
or write if you wish your work to endure.

No doubt here was wisdom in a little box; and I fell to wondering
stupidly what there could possibly be in being a worker at the other,
the evanescent thing. I remembered a certain kind of moth that dies soon
after it is born. Are these people moths?

And then one night a ragtag ghost