modation of the innumerable throngs which now flocked to the banks
of the Potomac. But when was American enterprise unequal to a crisis?
The necessary hotels, lodging houses and restaurants were constructed
with astounding rapidity. One could see the city growing and expanding
day by day and week after week. It flowed over Georgetown Heights; it
leaped the Potomac; it spread east and west, south and north; square mile
after square mile of territory was buried under the advancing buildings,
until the gigantic city, which had thus grown up like a mushroom in a
night, was fully capable of accommodating all its expected guests.

At first it had been intended that the heads of the various governments
should in person attend this universal congress, but as the enterprise
went on, as the enthusiasm spread, as the necessity for haste became
more apparent through the warning notes which were constantly sounded
from the observatories where the astronomers were nightly beholding new
evidences of threatening preparations in Mars, the kings and queens
of the old world felt that they could not remain at home; that their
proper place was at the new focus and centre of the whole world--the
city of Washington. Without concerted action, without interchange of
suggestion, this impulse seemed to seize all the old world monarchs
at once. Suddenly cablegrams flashed to the Government at Washington,
announcing that Queen Victoria, the Emperor William, the Czar Nicholas,
Alphonso of Spain, with his mother, Maria Christina; the old Emperor
Francis Joseph and the Empress Elizabeth, of Austria; King Oscar and Queen
Sophia, of Sweden and Norway; King Humbert and Queen Margherita, of Italy;
King George and Queen Olga, of Greece; Abdul Hamid, of Turkey; Tsait'ien,
Emperor of China; Mutsuhito, the Japanese Mikado, with his beautiful
Princess Haruko; the President of France, the President of Switzerland,
the First Syndic of the little republic of Andorra, perched on the crest
of the Pyrenees, and the heads of all the Central and South American
republics, were coming to Washington to take part in the deliberations,
which, it was felt, were to settle the fate of earth and Mars.

One day, after this announcement had been received, and the additional
news had come that nearly all the visiting monarchs had set out,
attended by brilliant suites and convoyed by fleets of warships, for
their destination, some coming across the Atlantic to the port of New
York