ook that up everywhere, it passed from mouth to mouth,
at every street corner under the paling lights of dawn orators stood
unchecked, calling upon the spirit of America to arise, making the
shame a personal reality to every one who heard. To Bert, listening five
hundred feet above, it seemed that the city, which had at first produced
only confused noises, was now humming like a hive of bees--of very angry
bees.

After the smashing of the City Hall and Post-Office, the white flag had
been hoisted from a tower of the old Park Row building, and thither had
gone Mayor O'Hagen, urged thither indeed by the terror-stricken property
owners of lower New York, to negotiate the capitulation with Von
Winterfeld. The Vaterland, having dropped the secretary by a rope
ladder, remained hovering, circling very slowly above the great
buildings, old and new, that clustered round City Hall Park, while the
Helmholz, which had done the fighting there, rose overhead to a height
of perhaps two thousand feet. So Bert had a near view of all that
occurred in that central place. The City Hall and Court House, the
Post-Office and a mass of buildings on the west side of Broadway, had
been badly damaged, and the three former were a heap of blackened ruins.
In the case of the first two the loss of life had not been considerable,
but a great multitude of workers, including many girls and women, had
been caught in the destruction of the Post-Office, and a little army of
volunteers with white badges entered behind the firemen, bringing out
the often still living bodies, for the most part frightfully charred,
and carrying them into the big Monson building close at hand. Everywhere
the busy firemen were directing their bright streams of water upon the
smouldering masses: their hose lay about the square, and long cordons of
police held back the gathering black masses of people, chiefly from the
east side, from these central activities.

In violent and extraordinary contrast with this scene of destruction,
close at hand were the huge newspaper establishments of Park Row. They
were all alight and working; they had not been abandoned even while
the actual bomb throwing was going on, and now staff and presses were
vehemently active, getting out the story, the immense and dreadful story
of the night, developing comment and, in most cases, spreading the idea
of resistance under the very noses of the airships. For a long time Bert
could not imagine what these ca