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The blacksmith was told that “Sooners” were human beings, too, no better or worse than “Hoosiers,” who were people from Indiana.

And the old man who had moved that I be allowed to speak later on got up and said this: “Young man, you’re no better than the Albanian influenza or The Green Death, if you can kill for joy.”

• • •

I was impressed. I realized that nations could never acknowledge their own wars as tragedies, but that families not only could but had to.

Bully for them!

• • •

The chief reason the blacksmith was not allowed to go to war, though, was that he had so far fathered three illegitimate children by different women, “and had two more in the oven,” as someone said.

He wasn’t going to be allowed to run away from caring for all those babies.

46

EVEN THE CHILDREN and the drunks and the lunatics at that meeting seemed shrewdly familiar with parliamentary procedures. The little girl behind the lectern kept things moving so briskly and purposefully that she might have been some sort of goddess up there, equipped with an armload of thunderbolts.

I was so filled with respect for these procedures, which had always seemed like such solemn tomfoolery to me before.

• • •

And I am still so respectful, that I have just looked up their inventor in my Encyclopedia here in the Empire State Building.

His name was Henry Martyn Robert. He was a graduate of West Point. He was an engineer. He became a general by and by. But, just before the Civil War, when he was a lieutenant stationed in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he had to run a church meeting, and he lost control of it.

There were no rules.

So this soldier sat down and wrote some rules, which were the identical rules I saw followed in Indianapolis. They were published as Robert’s Rules of Order, which I now believe to be one of the four greatest inventions by Americans.

The other three, in my opinion, were The Bill of Rights, the principles of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the artificial extended families envisioned by Eliza and me.

• • •

The three recruits which the Indianapolis Daffodils finally voted to send off to the King of Michigan, incidentally, were all people who could be most easily spared, and who, in the opinion of the voters, had had the most carefree lives so far.

Hi ho.

• • •

The next order of business had to do with feeding and sheltering Daffodil refugees, who were trickling into town from all the fighting in the northern part of the state.

The meeting again discouraged an enthusiast. A young woman, quite beautiful but disorderly, and clearly crazed by altruism, said that she could take at least twenty refugees into her home.

Somebody else got up and said to her that she was such an incompetent housekeeper that her own children had gone to live with other relatives.

Another person pointed out to her that she was so absent-minded that her dog would have starved to death, if it weren’t for neighbors, and that she had accidentally set fire to her house three times.

• • •

This sounds as though the people at the meeting were being cruel. But they all called her “Cousin Grace” or “Sister Grace,” as the case might be. She was my cousin too, of course. She was a Daffodil-13.

What was more: She was a menace only to herself, so nobody was particularly mad at her. Her children had wandered off to better-run houses almost as soon as they were able to walk, I was told. That was surely one of the most attractive features of Eliza’s and my invention, I think: Children had so many homes and parents to choose from.

Cousin Grace, for her part, heard all the bad reports on herself as though they were surprising to her, but no doubt true. She did not flee in tears. She stayed for the rest of the meeting, obeying Robert’s Rules of Order, and looking sympathetic and alert.

At one point, under “New Business,” Cousin Grace made a motion that any Daffodil who served with the Great Lakes Pirates or in the army of the Duke of Oklahoma should be