accent on the ‘on.’  This morning at the refugee camp I found all the little Servians of the Frothingham unit in American Boy Scout uniforms.  That’s my meat.  That’s ’home week’ stuff.  You fellows write for the editorial page; and nobody reads it.  I write for the man that turns first to Mutt and Jeff, and then looks to see where they are running the new Charlie Chaplin release.  When that man has to choose between ’our military correspondent’ and the City Hall Reporter, he chooses me!”

The third man was John, “Our Special Artist.”  John could write a news story, too, but it was the cartoons that had made him famous.  They were not comic page, but front page cartoons, and before making up their minds what they thought, people waited to see what their Artist thought.  So, it was fortunate his thoughts were as brave and clean as they were clever.  He was the original Little Brother to the Poor.  He was always giving away money.  When we caught him, he would prevaricate.  He would say the man was a college chum, that he had borrowed the money from him, and that this was the first chance he had had to pay it back.  The Kid suggested it was strange that so many of his college chums should at the same moment turn up, dead broke, in Salonika, and that half of them should be women.

John smiled disarmingly.  “It was a large college,” he explained, “and coeducational.”  There were other Americans; Red Cross doctors and nurses just escaped through the snow from the Bulgars, and hyphenated Americans who said they had taken out their first papers.  They thought hyphenated citizens were so popular with us, that we would pay their passage to New York.  In Salonika they were transients.  They had no local standing.  They had no local lying-down place, either, or place to eat, or to wash, although they did not look as though that worried them, or place to change their clothes.  Or clothes to change.  It was because we had clothes to change, and a hotel bedroom, instead of a bench in a cafe, that we were ranked as residents and from the Greek police held a “permission to sojourn.”  Our American colony was a very close corporation.  We were only six Americans against 300,000 British, French, Greek, and Servian soldiers, and 120,000 civilian Turks, Spanish Jews, Armenians, Persians, Egyptians, Albanians, and Arabs, and some twenty more other faces that are not listed.  We had arrived in Salonika before the rush, and at the Hotel Hermes on the water-front had secured a vast room.  The edge of the stone quay was not forty feet from us, the only landing steps directly opposite our balcony.  Everybody who arrived on the Greek passenger boats from Naples or the Piraeus, or who had shore leave from a * man-of-war, transport, or hospital ship, was raked by our cameras.  There were four windows—­one for each of us and his worktable.  It was not easy to work.  What was the use?  The pictures and stories outside the windows fascinated us, but when we sketched them