There was a scrambling from cots, men with missing limbs, lads with heavily bandaged faces, soldiers in every manner of hospital négligé. The thump of crutches was heard along the halls--more than a hundred answered the first call. When the officer in charge looked over the battered and motley assembly, saw the lame and helpless being assisted into motor vehicles for the journey to court, he gave an order designed to produce more formal dress for another occasion, but did not dampen the ardor of that going! And before the judge they held up their hands, or stumps of hands, and swore their fealty to the country to which already they had given better proof. Out at Camp Zachary Taylor, near Louisville, Kentucky, is a great ash tree, now come to be known as “Naturalization Tree.” Its arms, in benediction, have been spread out over many hundreds of new citizens as they took the oath of allegiance and marched away upon their first American duty. That tree is for them a monument, a memorial of a Great Occasion. In one of the Eastern camps three officers, helping the Naturalization Service in this business, looked up at one another in the spell of a common thought: “Here we are, Major Schmidt, Captain Pulaski, and Lieutenant Martinelli”--such might have been their names; they were of races as various--“all of foreign birth, helping to make Americans!” ’Twas a pregnant thought, and it typified what was going on all over the country, in preparation for the “doing of great things together,” for the new nation’s acquisition of “a common glory in the past ... a will to do still greater things in the future.” In the varied procession that passed on this errand before just one court came a Gentleman from Verona and a Merchant of Venice, as the judge himself styled them; a Filipino who had served two years in the Philippine constabulary; an Abyssinian count, born in Somaliland and claiming kinship to King Menelik and to speak twenty-seven languages. Then there was Dugga Ram, a Hindu, whom the judge made an exception to the rule against Asiatics; and the man from Russian Poland, who denied having any sovereign at all; the Armenian who said he would refuse citizenship if to get it he had to acknowledge himself a Turkish subject; the technically alien color sergeant who had served for years in the regular army and had been wounded in the Philippines.