ent, captured by the Germans; he escapes and is the first to
warn the English people."

On the same morning, In an editorial in The Times of London, appeared
this paragraph:

"The Germans were first seen by the Hon. Arthur Herbert, the eldest son
of Lord Cinaris; Mr. Patrick Headford Birrell--both of Balliol College,
Oxford; and Mr. Lester Ford, the correspondent of the New York Republic.
These gentlemen escaped from the landing party that tried to make them
prisoners, and at great risk proceeded in their motor-car over roads
infested by the Germans to all the coast towns of Norfolk, warning the
authorities. Should the war office fail to recognize their services, the
people of Great Britain will prove that they are not ungrateful."

A week later three young men sat at dinner on the terrace of the Savoy.

"Shall we, or shall we not," asked Herbert, "tell my uncle that we
three, and we three alone, were the invaders?"

"That's hardly correct," said Ford, "as we now know there were two
hundred thousand invaders. We were the only three who got ashore."

"I vote we don't tell him," said Birrell. "Let him think with everybody
else that the Germans blundered; that an advance party landed too soon
and gave the show away. If we talk," he argued, "We'll get credit for a
successful hoax. If we keep quiet, everybody will continue to think we
saved England. I'm content to let it go at that."

Chapter 4. BLOOD WILL TELL

David Greene was an employee of the Burdett Automatic Punch Company.
The manufacturing plant of the company was at Bridgeport, but in the
New York offices there were working samples of all the punches, from the
little nickel-plated hand punch with which conductors squeezed holes in
railroad tickets, to the big punch that could bite into an iron plate
as easily as into a piece of pie. David's duty was to explain these
different punches, and accordingly when Burdett Senior or one of the
sons turned a customer over to David he spoke of him as a salesman.
But David called himself a "demonstrator." For a short time he even
succeeded in persuading the other salesmen to speak of themselves as
demonstrators, but the shipping clerks and bookkeepers laughed them out
of it. They could not laugh David out of it. This was so, partly
because he had no sense of humor, and partly because he had a
great-great-grandfather. Among the salesmen on lower Broadway, to
possess a great-great-grandfather is unusual, even a great-g