“No, no, you don’t understand. When I say—well—it’s just the shell of my father walking around and talking around, these ten years past. Prison killed his heart. He doesn’t even know it, that the immortal soul of him has gone out. You know him, doctor. Ben Hallett; the Radical—‘the Destroyer,’ they used to call him in the old days. He was a brave man, doctor; you’ve got to give him that; as brave as John the Baptist, and as mad. I can see him now,—to-night,—sitting in the back room in Eighth Street, he and old Radinov and Hirsch and O’Reilly and the rest, with all the doors shut and the windows shut and their eyes and ears and minds shut up tight, trying to keep the war out. They’re old men, doctor, and they must cling to yesterday, and to to-morrow. They mustn’t see to-day. They must ignore to-day. To-day is the tragic interruption. They too ask nothing but to wake up and find it isn’t so. All their lives they’ve been straining forward to see the ineffable dawn of the Day of Man, calling for the Commune and the red barricades of revolution. The barricades! Yesterday, it seems to them now, they were almost in sight of the splendid dawn—the dawn of the Day of Barricades. And then this war, this thing they call a ‘rich man’s plot’ to confound them, hold them up, turn to ashes all the fire of their lives. All they can do is sit in a closed room with their eyes shut and wait till this meaningless brawl is done. And then, to-morrow—to-morrow—some safely distant to-morrow (for they’re old men),—to-morrow, the barricades! And that’s queer. That’s queer.” “Queer?” “It seems to me that for days now, for weeks and months now, there’s been no sound to be heard in all the length and breadth of the world but the sound of barricades.” The voice trailed off into nothing. To the doctor, charging slowly back and forth along the near deck, his hands locked behind him and his face bent slightly over his breast, there came a queer sense of separation, from Hallett, from himself, his own everyday acts, his own familiar aspirations, from the ship which held him up in the dark void between two continents. What was it all about, he asked himself over and over. Each time he passed the shadow in the companionway he turned his head, painfully, and as if against his will. Once he stopped squarely at the foot of the cot and stood staring down at the figure there, faintly outlined, motionless and mute. Sweat stood for a moment on his brow, and was gone in the steady onrush of the wind. And he was used to death. But Hallett had fooled him. He heard Hallett’s whisper creeping to him out of the shadow: “That’s a bright star, doctor.” THE BIRD OF SERBIA _By_ JULIAN STREET From _Collier’s Weekly_ _Copyright, 1918, by P. F. Collier & Son, Inc._ _Copyright, 1919, by Julian Street._