[Illustration with caption: And at that it seems a lot of money to
pay for a rig which can be worn at most only two months]

And then, with a quick curtain, the good ship Espagne, a French
liner, is discovered in New York harbour the next day with Henry
and me aboard her, trying to distinguish as she crawfishes out of
the dock, the faces of our waving friends from the group upon the
pier.

The good ship Espagne is all steamed up and scooting through the
night, with two or three hundred others of the cast of characters
aboard; and there is Europe and the war in the cast of characters,
and the Boche, and Fritzie and the Hun, that diabolic trinity of
evil, and just back of the boat on the scenery of the first act,
splattered like guinea freckles all over the American map for three
thousand miles north, south, east and west, are a thousand replicas
of Wichita and Emporia. So it really is not of arms and the man
that this story is written, nor of Henry and me, and the war; but
it is the eternal Wichita and Emporia in the American heart that
we shall celebrate hereinafter as we unfold our tale. Of course,
that makes it provincial. And people living in New York or Boston,
or Philadelphia (but not Chicago, for half of the people there have
just come to town and the other half is just ready to leave town)
may not understand this story. For in some respects New York is
larger than Wichita and Emporia; but not so much larger; for mere
numbers of population amount to little. There is always an angle of
the particular from which one can see it as a part of the universal;
and seen properly the finite is always infinite. And that brings
us back naturally to Henry and me, looking out at the scurrying