“The Iron Gentleman” and his sons have revived the cult of boxing and bare fist fighting, and as a result there is many a black eye and bloody nose among both “delicate,” and “muckers” of Springfield. We are as thoroughly damaged as German duelling students, though with not quite the same marks. And the boy scouts are getting battered up, and something must be done to put a stop to this. “The Iron Gentleman” and his two older sons have the forge-burned faces of blacksmiths. But though the youngest excels in their accomplishments, he is more a brother of his father’s cavalry-sword, the Damascus Blade. Like the rest he is tall and slender, but there is a difference. He hardly needs his father’s gift to the world; he is such a fencer with the shorter and more conventional blade. He looks like the flattering portraits of Louis Fourteenth of France, that were made in that monarch’s youth. He has a great turn for pageantry, though with him it has taken a completely democratic phase. There is no sounder citizen in all his works and ways than this Joseph Bartholdi Michael. He has studied long under Thomas Wood Stevens, William Chauncey Langdon, and Percy Mackaye. And so he has established a pageantry calendar for the city which has been adopted by the City Commissioners, backed by the Chamber of Commerce, the Art Association, the Rotary Club, the Lion’s Club, and the Optimist’s Club. He has somewhat mitigated the “scrapping” of the boy scouts by evolving a code book of chivalry for them, and it endeavors to impart taboos, observances, and as well, honorifics for real merit. He ties up all these with the pomps of his calendar. He it is that imparts to his youthful followers a special consideration for the ladies, and reverence for their beauty. He fought at the Meuse-Argonne, was all through the battle of a little more than five weeks’ length from September 26, 1918, on through hell and glory to November first, when the American First Army cut like magic swords through those four intricate systems of German defenses, that were spread out over those famous ten miles. On November the first he and many Springfield boys, including his two blacksmith brothers, were going on like fate, like their own irresistible blades which they managed to carry into that long five weeks’ battle. In all this Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the exquisite, was the dashing leader of his group, a private in the ranks, but from the beginning to the end, _a sword_. And they swept forward with the American First Army till the very end of hostilities on the eleventh of November. They did their full share of the work of that American First Army, which, the experts say, took sixteen thousand prisoners, 468 guns, 2,664 machines guns, 177 trench mortars, made an advance of 34 miles in 47 days and set free 1,550 square kilometers of French ground and 150 villages. Indeed they took their due part in that battle which saved the world.