s jazz tremblors and its girl shows, develops a severe sinking sensation
in the pit of its financial stomach, accompanied by acute darting pains
at the juncture of Broad and Wall. This is the way Thomas Carlyle used to
start off a new chapter, and I like it. It denotes erudition. Ziegfeld
builds a new Follies show around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints.
North Dakota blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers that darned
thing was loaded in both barrels. The Prussians are pained to note that
for some reason or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge
against them. Nine thousand Kentucky mint patches are plowed under and the
sites sown with rosemary; that's for remembrance. In New York plans are
undertaken for construing the Eighteenth Amendment along the lines of the
selective draft, upon the theory that booze is a bad thing for some people
and much too good for many of the others. The word "intrigued" creeps into
our language and becomes common property, but the fiction writers saw it
first. A business men's cabinet, composed almost exclusively of
politicians, succeeds a business men's cabinet composed almost
exclusively of politicians. In order to hurry along the payment of
Installment One of the Indemnity France whistles up the reserves and that
chore is chored. Pessimists, including many of the old-line Democrats,
practically all the maltsters, and Aunt Emma Goldman, are filled with a
dismal conviction that creation has gone plum' to perdition in a hand
basket. Those more optimistically inclined look upon the brighter side of
things and distill consolation from the thought that nothing is so bad but
what it might have been worse--Trotzky might have been born twins. Great
Britain has her post-war industrial crisis, Serial Number 24. The Sinn
Fein enlarges the British national anthem to read God Save the King Till
We Can Get at Him! By a strict party vote Congress decides the share in
the victory achieved by the A.E.F. was overwhelmingly Republican, but that
the airship program went heavily Democratic. Popular distrust of
home-brew recipes assumes a nationwide phase. This brings us up to the
early spring of this year of grace, 1921, which is what I have been aiming
for all through this paragraph.

Quite without warning, I discovered along about the first of March that
something ailed me; something was rocking the boat. About my heart there
was a sense of pressure, so it seemed to me, or else my imaginati