Invitation to Life

1 W omen were wondering how large leg o’ mutton sleeves could be (and still remain not too ultra) and with great newspaper publicity Grant’s Tomb was dedicated on Riverside Drive, New York. With headlong haste humans moved in the direction of the Klondike, where, it was said, gold could be found; people asked each other if it wasn’t horrible to think of the one hundred and fifty French socialites, mostly women, who had been burned to death while watching these new-fangled cinematographic pictures at the Charity Bazaar in Paris. A man named S. A. Andree, with notable courage, went up in the air in a balloon at Spitzbergen and started for the North Pole; a person styled an “anarchist” cut short the life of Premier Canovas del Castillo in Spain and a man named Azcarraga became the next premier; in the interests of civilization men with the latest weapons of warfare moved on lesser frontiers in India, suppressing natives, thereby leaving Waziri, Fulah and Afridi widows to mourn for the suppressed. Ships’ guns spoke as sailors of the Powers bombarded the Greeks, battling the Turks, on the island of Crete. Lifeless bodies lay among the sugar fields of Cuba as Spanish soldiers passed on their way; and the Germans seized Kiau-Chau after two missionaries had been most basely murdered. Burning against injustice, General Morales led a revolt against President Barrios in Guatemala; the world seemed to be going to pot in Austria, where Count Badeni found the government paralyzed; strikers hoped against hope in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Hamburg, while a goodly number of adult persons spent many hours becoming expert in knocking a little ball about in a game named ping-pong. In France a few brave men were working to gain revision of sentence for Alfred Dreyfus, while the world blithely whistled something about Tararara-boomdeay and how sweet Daisy looked on a bicycle built for two, and decided that this man, Albert Chevalier, was “a card”.