## WHAT HAPPENED

WHEN IT WAS SCIENTIFICALLY DEMONSTRATED THAT THE MOON WAS MADE OUT OF GREEN CHEESE.

4. Moon Songs were forbidden by an Act of Congress—a proceeding which made 46,362 people shriek with joy.

2. Three dozen desperate minor poets ate themselves sick on absinthe frappés.

3. Mr. Roosevelt addressed the Trustees of the Smithsonian Institution on the more complex scientific aspects of the phenomenon regarded, especially in its relation to the Growing Menace of Mollycoddlism.

4. On the Stock Exchange the Cheese Market sagged 132 points in forty-seven seconds.

5. And of course it was n't any time at all before the Cold-Storage Folks had made arrangements to hold the whole satellite for the next food shortage.

6. 2,432 Dutch dialect teams rang out the old—rang in the new—and started their acts by propounding the scream: “Ven iss it iss a moon not a moon?”

7. It was insisted by Mr. Bryan of Nebraska that faith in the genuineness of the cheese should become the sole test of the new Democracy.

8. All diffident young lovers turned particularly happy because it afforded a new topic of conversation.

9. Of the astronomers, ninety-seven per cent. said they had known it all along, while the remaining three per cent. requested not to be bothered with anything so vulgarly near as a mere moon.

10. A religious cult known as the Cheeseites sprang up, and was promptly rotten-egged out of town by various independent and liberty-loving American citizens.

11. 1,462 orthodox theologians wrote 25,678 books and pamphlets showing conclusively that the moon could n't be made of green cheese:

a) Because such a belief was irreverent.

b) Because it was immoral.

c) Because it was hopeless.

12. And naturally, every Real-Estate Dealer who had the price put big spreads in all the Sunday papers to the general effect:

> "WHY PAY RENT WHEN YOU CAN OWN YOUR OWN HOME IN CHEESEHURST? THREE MINUTES' WALK FROM proposed NEW AERIAL LANDING."

And when it was found out that the Moon *was n't* made of Green Cheese, and in fact that it was n't made of anything good to eat, eighty million four hundred and thirty-two thousand six hundred and seventy-five babies started right in crying for it again.

Horatio Winslow.