From Mrs. Isadore Kantor: "You should have seen the balconies, mother. Isadore and I went up just to see the jam." "Six thousand dollars in the house to-night, if there was a cent," said Isadore Kantor. "Hand me my violin, please, Esther. I must have scratched it, the way they pushed." "No, son, you didn't. I've already rubbed it up. Sit quiet, darlink!" He was limply white, as if the vitality had flowed out of him. "God! wasn't it--tremendous?" "Six thousand, if there was a cent," repeated Isadore Kantor. "More than Rimsky ever played to in his life!" "Oh, Izzie, you make me sick, always counting--counting!" "Your sister's right, Isadore. You got nothing to complain of if there was only six hundred in the house. A boy whose fiddle has made already enough to set you up in such a fine business, his brother Boris in such a fine college, automobiles--style--and now because Vladimir Rimsky, three times his age, gets signed up with Elsass for a few thousand more a year, right away the family gets a long face--" "Ma, please! Isadore didn't mean it that way!" "Pa's knocking, ma! Shall I let him in?" "Let him in, Roody. I'd like to know what good it will do to try to keep him out." In an actual rain of perspiration, his tie slid well under one ear, Abrahm Kantor burst in, mouthing the words before his acute state of strangulation would let them out. "Elsass--it's Elsass outside! He--wants--to sign--Leon--fifty concerts--coast to coast--two thousand--next season! He's got the papers--already drawn up--the pen outside waiting--" "Abrahm!" "Pa!" In the silence that followed, Isadore Kantor, a poppiness of stare and a violent redness set in, suddenly turned to his five-year-old son, sticky with lollipop, and came down soundly and with smack against the infantile, the slightly outstanding and unsuspecting ear. "_Momser!_" he cried. "_Chammer! Lump! Ganef_! You hear that? Two thousand! Two thousand! Didn't I tell you--didn't I tell you to practise?" Even as Leon Kantor put pen to this princely document, Franz Ferdinand of Serbia, the assassin's bullet cold, lay dead in state, and let slip were the dogs of war. * * * * * In the next years, men, forty deep, were to die in piles; hayricks of fields to become human hayricks of battle-fields; Belgium disemboweled, her very entrails dragging, to find all the civilized world her champion, and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousand upon thousand of them, to mark the places where the youth of her allies fell, avenging outrage. Seas, even when calmest, were to become terrible, and men's heart-beats, a bit sluggish with the fatty degeneration of a sluggard peace, to quicken and then to throb with the rat-a-tat-tat, the rat-a-tat-tat of the most peremptory, the most reverberating call to arms in the history of the world. In June, 1917, Leon Kantor, answering that rat-a-tat-tat, enlisted.