"EXTRA"

Toward nine o'clock to my relief it became obvious that the _Re
d'Italia_ was really going to sail at last. The first and second
whistles, sounding raucously, sent the company officials and the family
of the young officer of reserves ashore. The plank was lowered; between
the ship and the looming pier a thread of black water appeared and grew;
a flash and an explosion indicated that the possibly doomed liner had
been filmed according to schedule. "_Evviva l'Italia_!" yelled the
returning braves in the steerage--a very decent set of fellows, it
struck me, to leave so cheerfully their vocations of teamster, waiter,
fruit vender, and the like, and go, unforced, to wear the gray-green
coats of Italy, the short feathers of the mountain climbers, the
bersagliere's bunch of plumes, and to stand against their hereditary
foes the Austrians, up in the snowy Alps.

The details of departure were an old tale to me. As we swung farther and
farther out, I turned to a newspaper, a twentieth extra probably, which
I had heard a newsboy crying along the dock a little earlier, and had
bribed a steward to secure. Moon and stars were lacking to-night, but
the deck lights were good reading-lamps. Moving up the rail to one of
them, I investigated the world's affairs.

From the first sheet the usual staring headlines leaped at me. There
were the inevitable peace rumor, the double denial, the eternal bulletin
of a trench taken here, a hill recaptured there. A sensational rumor was
exploited to the effect that Franz von Blenheim, one of the star secret
agents of the German Empire, was at present incognito at Washington,
having spent the past month in putting his finger in the Mexican
pie much to our disadvantage. On the last column of the page was the