of him great fires were raging. He was
a hero, that man who staid by his post--an obscure newspaperman, most
likely.

"For twenty-four hours, he said, no transatlantic airships had arrived,
and no more messages were coming from England. He did state, though,
that a message from Berlin--that's in Germany--announced that Hoffmeyer,
a bacteriologist of the Metchnikoff School, had discovered the serum for
the plague. That was the last word, to this day, that we of America
ever received from Europe. If Hoffmeyer discovered the serum, it was too
late, or otherwise, long ere this, explorers from Europe would have
come looking for us. We can only conclude that what happened in America
happened in Europe, and that, at the best, some several score may have
survived the Scarlet Death on that whole continent.

"For one day longer the despatches continued to come from New York.
Then they, too, ceased. The man who had sent them, perched in his lofty
building, had either died of the plague or been consumed in the great
conflagrations he had described as raging around him. And what had
occurred in New York had been duplicated in all the other cities. It was
the same in San Francisco, and Oakland, and Berkeley. By Thursday the
people were dying so rapidly that their corpses could not be handled,
and dead bodies lay everywhere. Thursday night the panic outrush for
the country began. Imagine, my grandsons, people, thicker than the
salmon-run you have seen on the Sacramento river, pouring out of the
cities by millions, madly over the country, in vain attempt to escape
the ubiquitous death. You see, they carried the germs with them. Even
the airships of the rich, fleeing for mountain and desert fastnesses,
carried the germs.

"Hundreds of these airships escaped to Hawaii, and not only did they
bring the plague with them, but they found the plague already there
before them. This we learned, by the despatches, until all order in San
Francisco vanished, and there were no operators left at their posts to
receive or send. It was amazing, astounding, this loss of communication
with the world. It was exactly as if the world had ceased, been blotted
out. For sixty years that world has no longer existed for me. I know
there must be such places as New York, Europe, Asia, and Africa; but not
one word has been heard of them--not in sixty years. With the coming of
the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably. Ten
thousand years o