'Do? The Little Village'll go crazy! I'll knock up a series of old-world plays for 'em. Their voices will make you laugh and cry. My God, dear men, where _do_ you suppose they picked up all their misery from, on this sweet earth? I'll have a pageant of the world's beginnings, and Mosenthal shall do the music. I'll--' 'Go and knock up a village for 'em by to-night. We'll meet you at No. 15 West Landing Tower,' said De Forest. 'Remember the rest will be coming along to-morrow.' 'Let 'em all come!' said Vincent. 'You don't know how hard it is nowadays even for me, to find something that really gets under the public's damned iridium-plated hide. But I've got it at last. Good-bye!' 'Well,' said De Forest when we had finished laughing, 'if any one understood corruption in London I might have played off Vincent against Gerolstein, and sold my captives at enormous prices. As it is, I shall have to be their legal adviser to-night when the contracts are signed. And they won't exactly press any commission on me, either.' 'Meantime,' said Takahira, 'we cannot, of course, confine members of Leopold Vincent's last-engaged company. Chairs for the ladies, please, Arnott.' 'Then I go to bed,' said De Forest. 'I can't face any more women!' And he vanished. When our passengers were released and given another meal (finger-bowls came first this time) they told us what they thought of us and the Board; and, like Vincent, we all marvelled how they had contrived to extract and secrete so much bitter poison and unrest out of the good life God gives us. They raged, they stormed, they palpitated, flushed and exhausted their poor, torn nerves, panted themselves into silence, and renewed the senseless, shameless attacks. 'But can't you understand,' said Pirolo pathetically to a shrieking woman, 'that if we'd left you in Chicago you'd have been killed?' 'No, we shouldn't. You were bound to save us from being murdered.' 'Then we should have had to kill a lot of other people.' 'That doesn't matter. We were preaching the Truth. You can't stop us. We shall go on preaching in London; and _then_ you'll see!' 'You can see now,' said Pirolo, and opened a lower shutter. We were closing on the Little Village, with her three million people spread out at ease inside her ring of girdling Main-Traffic lights--those eight fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill, Dorking, Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend. Leopold Vincent's new company looked, with small pale faces, at the silence, the size, and the separated houses. Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly--always without shame. MACDONOUGH'S SONG Whether the State can loose and bind In Heaven as well as on Earth: If it be wiser to kill mankind Before or after the birth-- These are matters of high concern Where State-kept schoolmen are; But Holy State (we have lived to learn) Endeth in Holy War.