What they mean is that, taken all in all, Germany owes the world 132,000,000,000 gold marks plus carfare. This includes everything, breakage, meals sent to room, good will, everything. Now, it is understood that if they really meant this, Germany couldn’t even draw cards; so the principle on which the thing is figured out is as follows: (Watch this closely; there is a trick in it).
You put down a lot of figures, like this. Any figures will do, so long as you can’t read them quickly:
132,000,000,000 gold marks
$33,000,000,000 on a current value basis
$21,000,000,000 on reparation account plus 12-1/2% yearly tax on German exports
11,000,000,000 gold fish
$1.35 amusement tax
866,000 miles. Diameter of the sun
2,000,000,000
27,000,000,000
31,000,000,000
Then you add them together and subtract the number you first thought of. This leaves 11. And the card you hold in your hand is the seven of diamonds. Am I right?
XXXII—’TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE SUMMER
(An Imaginary Watch-Night with the Weather Man)
It was 11 o’clock on the night of June 20. We were seated in the office of the Weather Bureau on the twenty-ninth floor of the Whitehall Building, the Weather Man and I, and we were waiting for summer to come. It was officially due on June 21. We had the almanac’s word for it and years and years of precedent, but still the Weather Man was skeptical.
It had been a hard spring for the Weather Man. Day after day he had been forced to run a signed statement in the daily papers to the effect that some time during that day there would probably be showers. And day after day, with a ghastly consistency, his prophecy had come true. People had come to dislike him personally; old jokes about him were brought out and oiled and given a trial spin down the road a piece before appearing in funny columns and vaudeville skits, and the sporting writers, frenzied by the task of filling their space with nothing but tables of batting averages, had become positively libellous.
And now summer was at hand, and with it the promise of the sun. The Weather Man nibbled at his thumb nail. The clock on the wall said 11:15.
“It just couldn’t go back on us now,” he said, plaintively, “when it means so much to us. It always has come on the 21st.”
