room, where a half-dressed girl and a man shrank by the window, their faces sick with shame.
It was with her—ignoring Bill Kingdom's mutters of "Oh, drop it! Pick on somebody your size!"—that Elmer the vice-slayer became really Biblical.
Only the insistence of Bill Kingdom kept Lieutenant Gantry from making his men load the erring one into the patrol wagon in her chemise.
Then Elmer led them to a secret den where, it was securely reported, men were ruining their bodies and souls by guzzling the devil's brew of alcohol.
Mr. Oscar Hochlauf had been a saloon-keeper in the days before prohibition, but when prohibition came, he was a saloon-keeper. A very sound, old-fashioned, drowsy, agreeable resort was Oscar's Place; none of the grander public houses had more artistic soap scrawls on the mirror behind the bar; none had spicier pickled herring.
Tonight there were three men before the bar: Emil Fischer, the carpenter, who had a mustache like an ear-muff; his son Ben, whom Emil was training to drink wholesome beer instead of the whisky and gin which America was forcing on the people; and old Daddy Sorenson, the Swedish tailor.
They were discussing jazz.
"I came to America for liberty—I think Ben's son will go back to Germany for liberty," said Emil. "When I was a young man here, four of us used to play every Saturday evening—Bach we played, and Brahms—Gott weiss we played terrible, but we liked it, and we never made others listen. Now, wherever you go, this jazz, like a St. Vitus's. Jazz iss to music what this Reverend Gantry you read about is to an old-time Prediger. I guess maybe he was never born, that Gantry fellow—he was blowed out of a saxophone."
"Aw, this country's all right, Pa," said Ben.
"Sure, dot's right," said Oscar Hochlauf contentedly, while he sliced the foam off a glass of beer. "The Americans, like when I knew dem first, when dere was Bill Nye and Eugene Field, dey used to laugh. Now dey get solemn. When dey start laughing again, dey roar dere heads off at fellows like
