SKY LADDERS
“Seclusion in the upper cavities of these brick mountains must entail incredible hardships, ... but the landlords seem to hold that all these discomforts are compensated by the advantage of dwelling nearer heaven.”
A CHEERING PROSPECT
“In Oriental cities, with rare exceptions, everything suggesting the thought of death is hidden out of view; no sculptor would venture to exhibit an assortment of gravestones; but people to whom life brings nothing but a roundabout of toil and tedium may find solace in contemplating mementoes of the hour that will witness the end of their doom.”
The philanthropic traveler left his native land with ideals presaging a universal brotherhood of nations—perhaps under the leadership of our great Republic—but admits that, under present circumstances, our popular policy of expansion is, at best, only an attempt to widen the ring-walls of our slave-pen, before its gates are closed by a syndicate of bloodsuckers and boodle legislators.
The King’s Image
BY WALTER E. GROGAN
Author of “The Dregs of Wrath,” “The King’s Sceptre,” “The Curse of the Fultons,” etc.
I KNEW him at once. He was grayer, he was grimmer, he was more than ever like a man of granite, hard and immobile, but I knew him. The sight of him gravely unfolding his table napkin and covering his thin knees at luncheon in the little hotel set my thoughts back over ten years. I was then a lad of sixteen. I had seen him constantly in the queer medieval streets of Tsalburg, the little capital of Ertaria in the Balkans. Gray and grim, he was then the General Commandant of the army, the iron right hand of the Wolf King Peter XII. He was grayer and grimmer now, but undoubtedly the man. For a while I racked my memory for his name. It came suddenly. General Hartzel! Undoubtedly the man.