ing
men--and so the quarrels go on. By the way, I just stopped a piece of
news that might have interested you. Do you know that you have
suppressed the Declaration of Independence?"

"Nonsense. I haven't seen a copy of it in two years."

"Well, here's a despatch that I got away from the cable-office just in
time. It would have gone in another ten minutes. Here it is."

Sam took the paper and read an account of the printing by a native
committee of fifty thousand copies of the Declaration in Castalian, and
its immediate suppression by Colonel Jinks, the censor.

"It's a downright lie," cried Sam. "I'll call my native secretary and
inquire into this," and he rang his bell.

"See here, what does this mean?" he asked the clerk who hurried in.

The man thought a minute.

"I do not know the Declaration of Independence," he said, "but perhaps
that paper I translated for you the other day had something to do with
it. I have not a copy here."

"Were they burned?"

"Not yet, sir. They were seized, and are in our depot."

"Come," said Sam to Cleary, "let's go over there and look at it. It's a
half-mile walk and it will do me good."

"How are things at San Diego?" asked Sam, as they walked along
together. "You've been out there, haven't you?"

"Yes. We'll have to come in. The Cubapinos have got a force together at
a town farther down the river and are threatening us there. We got
pretty near them and mined under a convent they were in, and blew up a
lot of them, but it didn't do them much harm, for a lot of recruits
came in just afterward from the mountains. That convent was born to be
blown up, it seems, for some Castalian anarchists had a plot to blow it
up some years ago, and came near doing it, too. We made use of their
tunnels, which the monks were too lazy to have filled up. The anarchist
plot was found out, and they garroted a dozen of them."

"What inhuman brutes those anarchists are!" cried Sam. "Think of their
trying to blow up a whole houseful of people! I wish we could take
some one of the smaller islands and put all the anarchists of the world
there and let them live out their precious theories. Just think what a
hell it would be! What infernal engines of hatred and destruction they
would construct, if they were left to themselves--machines charged with
dynamite and bristling with all sorts of explosive contrivances!"

"Something like a battle-ship," suggested Clea