The Menckenii were converted to Christianity in 1569, but returned to paganism during the Napoleonic wars, in which twelve of them were killed and sixty-three wounded. The present Mencken is an amateur of military science, and has written a brochure, privately printed, on the Battle of Tannenberg. He writes very slowly and laboriously, save when writing for newspapers. Then he is highly facile, and can turn out a two-column article in three hours. He has never learned to dictate. He used to have a mole on the back of his neck, but had it removed in the summer of 1913. He is not afraid of the dark, or of spiders, or of snakes, or of cats. He likes dogs better than any other animals, and regards them as more respectable than men. If he could choose another given name it would be Francis. He owns two hundred acres of land near Innsbruck, in the Tyrol, and will build a bungalow on it after the war. He is a violent anti-Socialist, as “Men _vs._ the Man” shows, but he reads all the new Socialist books. In American history the men he most admires are Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Cleveland. He has a low opinion of Lincoln, Jackson, and Bryan. He is handy with horses, and can drive four-in-hand. He detests cut flowers, carpets, the sea-shore, hotels, zoological gardens, the subway, the Y. M. C. A., literary women, witch hazel, talcum powder, limp leather bookbindings, aerated waters, bottled beer, low collars, public libraries, and phonographs. He is a Cockney, and prefers the city to the country. He never wears tan shoes. He can swallow castor oil without disgust and without needing a chaser, but he never does so. Next to Pilsner and Burgundy (or, in wartime, Michelob) his favorite drink is city water direct from the tap—no ice. He chews cigars. He is a very fast reader and can get through a two hundred-page book in an hour. IV So much for my observations and investigations of the two gentlemen, MM. Nathan and Mencken. I have told you, not everything that is known about them, nor even all that I know myself, but enough, I hope, to enable you to conjure up colorable images of them. As I have said, it is by such small and often grotesque lights that character is genuinely illuminated—not by the steady and distorting glare of orthodox biography. It remains for me to tell you how they do their joint work—work which rests upon the apparently perilous basis of an absolute equality of authority, for each owns exactly the same amount of stock in _The Smart Set_ Company that the other owns, and each is editor equally with the other, and both derive from the property exactly the same revenue, to a cent.