"Abrahm!"

"Pa!"

In the silence that followed, Isadore Kantor, a poppiness of stare and
a violent redness set in, suddenly turned to his five-year-old son,
sticky with lollipop, and came down soundly and with smack against the
infantile, the slightly outstanding and unsuspecting ear.

"_Momser!_" he cried. "_Chammer! Lump! Ganef_! You hear that? Two
thousand! Two thousand! Didn't I tell you--didn't I tell you to
practise?"

Even as Leon Kantor put pen to this princely document, Franz Ferdinand
of Serbia, the assassin's bullet cold, lay dead in state, and let slip
were the dogs of war.

* * * * *

In the next years, men, forty deep, were to die in piles; hayricks of
fields to become human hayricks of battle-fields; Belgium disemboweled,
her very entrails dragging, to find all the civilized world her
champion, and between the poppies of Flanders, crosses, thousand upon
thousand of them, to mark the places where the youth of her allies fell,
avenging outrage. Seas, even when calmest, were to become terrible, and
men's heart-beats, a bit sluggish with the fatty degeneration of a
sluggard peace, to quicken and then to throb with the rat-a-tat-tat, the
rat-a-tat-tat of the most peremptory, the most reverberating call to
arms in the history of the world.