was beginning to waddle and puff as I walked.

Norah made frantic answer:

"For mercy's sake child, be careful or you'll be FAT!"

To which I replied: "Don't care if I am. Rather be hunky and healthy
than skinny and sick. Have tried both."

It is impossible to avoid becoming round-cheeked when one is working on
a paper that allows one to shut one's desk and amble comfortably home
for dinner at least five days in the week. Everybody is at least plump
in this comfortable, gemutlich town, where everybody placidly locks his
shop or office and goes home at noon to dine heavily on soup and meat
and vegetables and pudding, washed down by the inevitable beer and
followed by forty winks on the dining room sofa with the German Zeitung
spread comfortably over the head as protection against the flies.

There is a fascination about the bright little city. There is about it
something quaint and foreign, as though a cross-section of the old world
had been dumped bodily into the lap of Wisconsin. It does not seem at
all strange to hear German spoken everywhere--in the streets, in the
shops, in the theaters, in the street cars. One day I chanced upon a
sign hung above the doorway of a little German bakery over on the north
side. There were Hornchen and Kaffeekuchen in the windows, and a brood
of flaxen-haired and sticky children in the back of the shop. I stopped,
open-mouthed, to stare at the worn sign tacked over the door.

"Hier wird Englisch gesprochen," it announced.

I blinked. Then I read it again. I shut my eyes, and opened them again
suddenly. The fat German letters spoke their message as before--"English
spoken here."

On reaching the office I told Norberg, the city editor, about my
find. He was not impressed. Norberg never is impressed. He is the most
soul-satisfying and theatrical city editor that I have ever met. He
is fat, and unbelievably nimble, and keen-eyed, and untiring. He says,
"Hell!" when things go wrong; he smokes innumerable cigarettes, inhaling
the fumes and sending out the thin wraith of smoke with little explosive
sounds between tongue and lips; he wears blue shirts, and no collar to
speak of, and his trousers are kept in place only by a miracle and an
inefficient looking leather belt.

When he refused to see the story in the little German bakery sign I
began to argue.

"But man alive, this is America! I think I know a story when I see it.
Suppose you were traveling in Germany, and should come acro