ou. You shall have peace. I have spoken to
this purpose before. And give you me peace. Leave my yacht
_Energon_ alone. Commit one overt act against her and not one stone
in San Francisco shall stand upon another.

"To-morrow let all good citizens go out upon the hills that slope
down to the sea. Go with music and laughter and garlands. Make
festival for the new age that is dawning. Be like children upon your
hills, and witness the passing of war. Do not miss the opportunity.
It is your last chance to behold what henceforth you will be
compelled to seek in museums of antiquities.

"I promise you a merry day,
"GOLIAH."

The madness of magic was in the air. With the people it was as if all
their gods had crashed and the heavens still stood. Order and law had
passed away from the universe; but the sun still shone, the wind still
blew, the flowers still bloomed--that was the amazing thing about it.
That water should continue to run downhill was a miracle. All the
stabilities of the human mind and human achievement were crumbling. The
one stable thing that remained was Goliah, a madman on an island. And so
it was that the whole population of San Francisco went forth next day in
colossal frolic upon the hills that overlooked the sea. Brass bands and
banners went forth, brewery wagons and Sunday-school picnics--all the
strange heterogeneous groupings of swarming metropolitan life.

On the sea-rim rose the smoke from the funnels of a hundred hostile
vessels of war, all converging upon the helpless, undefended Golden Gate.
And not all undefended, for out through the Golden Gate moved the
_Energon_, a tiny toy of white, rolling like a straw in the stiff sea on
the bar where a strong ebb-tide ran in the teeth of the summer
sea-breeze. But the Japanese were cautious. Their thirty- and
forty-thousand-ton battleships slowed down half a dozen miles offshore
and manoeuvred in ponderous evolutions, while tiny scout-boats (lean,
six-funnelled destroyers) ran in, cutting blackly the flashing sea like
so many sharks. But, compared with the _Energon_, they were leviathans.
Compared with them, the _Energon_ was as the sword of the arch-angel
Michael, and they the forerunners of the hosts of hell.

But the flashing of the sword, the good people of San Francisco, gathered
on he