This was the larger picture. Now for a small corner of the canvas: I remember a squalid little cowshed in a little Dutch town on the border, just before dusk of a wet, raw autumnal night. Under the dripping eaves of that cowshed stood an old man--a very old man. He must have been all of eighty. His garments were sopping wet, and all that he owned now of this world's goods rested at his feet, tied up in the rags of an old red tablecloth. In one withered, trembling old hand he held a box of matches, and in the other a piece of chalk. With one hand he scratched match after match; and with the other, on the wall of that little cowshed, he wrote, over and over and over again, his name; and beneath it the name of the old wife from whom he was separated--doubtlessly forever. Possibly these things might have come to pass in any war, whether or not Germans were concerned in making that war; probably they should be included among the inevitable by-products of the institution called warfare. That, however, did not make them the less sorrowful. V The point I am trying to make is this: That, seeing such sights, and a thousand more like them, I could picture the same things--and a thousand worse things--happening in my own country. With better reason, I to-day can picture them as happening in my own country; and in all fairness I go further than that and say that I can conceive them as being all the more likely to happen should the invading forces come at us under that design of a black vulture which is known as the Imperial Prussian Eagle. Given similar conditions and similar opportunities, and I can see Holyoke, Massachusetts, or Charleston, South Carolina, razed in smoking ruins, as Louvain or as Dinant was. I can see the mayor of Baltimore being put to death by drum-head court-martial because some inflamed civilian of his town fired from a cottage window at a Pomeranian grenadier. I can see in Pennsylvania congressmen and judges and clergymen and G. A. R. veterans held as hostages and as potential victims of the firing squad, in case some son or some grandson of old John Burns, of Gettysburg, not regularly enrolled, takes up his shotgun in defence of his homestead. I can see a price put on the head of some modern Molly Pitcher, and a military prison waiting for some latter-day Barbara Frietchie. For we must remember that what we Americans call patriots the anointed War Lord calls _franc-tireurs_, meaning bushwhackers.