Some of the ladies they consulted was hostile about the tobacco end of it.  Mrs. Tracy Bangs said that no victim of the weed could keep up his mentality, and that she, for one, would rather see her Tracy lying in his casket than smoking vile tobacco that would destroy his intellect and make him a loathsome object in the home.  She said she knew perfectly well that if the countries at war had picked their soldiers from non-smokers it would have been all over in just a few days—­and didn’t that show you that the tobacco demon was as bad as the rum demon?

Mrs. Leonard Wales was not only bitter about tobacco but about any help at all.  She said our hard storms of that winter had been caused by the general hatred in Europe which created evil waves of malignity; so let ’em shoot each other till they got sense enough to dwell together in love and amity—­only we shouldn’t prolong the war by sending ’em soup and cigarettes, and so on.  Her idea seemed to be that if Red Gap would just stand firm in the matter the war would die a natural death.  Still, if a bazaar was really going to be held, she would consent to pose in a tableau if they insisted on it, and mebbe she could thus inject into the evil atmosphere of Europe some of the peace and good will that sets the United States apart from other nations.

Trust Cora Wales not to overlook a bet like that.  She’s a tall, sandy-haired party, with very extravagant contours, and the thing she loves best on earth is to get under a pasteboard crown, with gilt stars on it, and drape herself in the flag of her country, with one fat arm bare, while Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and the rest is gathered about and looking up to her for protection.  Mebbe she don’t look so bad as the Goddess of Liberty on a float in the middle of one of our wide streets when the Chamber of Commerce is giving a Greater Red Gap pageant; but take her in a hall, where you set close up to the platform, and she looks more like our boasted liberty has degenerated into license, or something like that.  Anyway, the committee had to promise her she could do something in her flag and crown and talcum powder, because they knew she’d knock the show if they didn’t.

This reminded ’em they had to have a program of entertainment; so they got me on the committee with the other Mes-dames to think up things, me always being an easy mark.  I find out right off that we’re a lot of foreigners and you got to be darned careful not to hurt anybody’s feelings.  Little Bertha Lehman’s pa would let her be a state—­Colorado or Nebraska, or something—­but he wouldn’t let her sing unless it would be a German song in the original; and Hobbs, the English baker, said his Tillie would have to sing “Britannia Rules the Waves,” or nothing; and two or three others said what they would and wouldn’t do, and it looked like Red Gap itself was going to be dug up into trenches.  I had to get little Magnesia Waterman, daughter of the coons that work in the U.S.  Grill, to do the main singing.  She seemed to be about the only American child soprano we had.  She sings right well for a kid, mostly these sad songs about heaven; but we picked out a good live one for her that seemed to be neutral.