ould be disposed of before it became quite worthless. The
conspiracy defeated itself, however, with so many frantic sellers
competing against each other and the news was out by the time the first
of my new columns appeared in the _Intelligencer_.

The first question which occurred to those of us calm enough to escape
panic was, how had the weed jumped the saltband? It was answered
simultaneously by many learned professors whose desire to break into
print and share the front page with the terrible grass overcame their
natural academic reticence. There was no doubt that originally the
peculiar voracity of the inoculated plant had not been inherited; but
it was equally uncontroverted that somehow, during the period it had
been halted by the salt, a mutation had happened and now every wind
blowing over the weed carried seeds no longer innocent but bearing
embryos of the destroyer.

Terror ran before the grass like a herald. The shock felt when Los
Angeles went down was multiplied tenfold. Now there was no predictable
course men could shape their actions to avoid. No longer was it possible
to watch and chart the daily advance of a single body so a partially
accurate picture could be formed of what might be expected tomorrow.
Instead of one mass there were countless ones; at the whim of a chance
wind or bird, seeds might alight in an area apparently safe and
overwhelm a community miles away from the living glacier. No place was
out of range of the attack; no square foot of land kept any value.

The stockmarket crashed, and I congratulated myself on having sent Fles
orders to sell. A day or two later the exchanges were closed and,
shortly after, the banks. Business came to a practical standstill. The
great industries shut down and all normal transactions of daily life
were conducted by means of barter. For the first time in threequarters
of a century the farmer was topdog; his eggs and milk, his wheat and
corn and potatoes he could exchange for whatever he fancied and on his
own terms. Fortunately for starving citydwellers his appetite for
manufactured articles and for luxuries was insatiable; their
automobiles, furcoats, costumejewelry, washingmachines, files of the
_National Geographic_, and their periodfurniture left the city flat for
the farm, to come back in the more acceptable form of steaks, butter,
fowl, and turnips. The whole elaborate structure of money and credit
seemed to disappear overnight like some tenuous dre