ate my attention, with only partial success. He was explaining
the new theory of city government that did not attempt to evade, but
dealt frankly with the human needs of to-day, and sought to meet those
needs in a positive way... What had happened to me, though I did not
realize it, was that I had gradually come under the influence of
a tragic spell not attributable to the words I heard, existing
independently of them, pervading the spacious hall, weaving into unity
dissentient minds. And then, with what seemed a retarded rather than
sudden awareness, I knew that he had stopped speaking. Once more he ran
his hand through his hair, he was seemingly groping for words that would
not come. I was pierced by a strange agony--the amazing source of which,
seemed to be a smile on the face of Hermann Krebs, an ineffable smile
illuminating the place like a flash of light, in which suffering and
tragedy, comradeship and loving kindness--all were mingled. He stood for
a moment with that smile on his face--swayed, and would have fallen had
it not been for the quickness of a man on the platform behind him, and
into whose arms he sank.

In an instant people had risen in their seats, men were hurrying down
the aisles, while a peculiar human murmur or wail persisted like an
undertone beneath the confusion of noises, striking the very note of
my own feelings. Above the heads of those about me I saw Krebs being
carried off the platform.... The chairman motioned for silence and
inquired if there were a physician in the audience, and then all began
to talk at once. The man who stood beside me clutched my arm.

"I hope he isn't dead! Say, did you see that smile? My God, I'll never
forget it!"

The exclamation poignantly voiced the esteem in which Krebs was held. As
I was thrust along out of the hall by the ebb of the crowd still other
expressions of this esteem came to me in fragments, expressions of
sorrow and dismay, of a loyalty I had not imagined. Mingled with these
were occasional remarks of skeptics shaken, in human fashion, by the
suggestion of the inevitable end that never fails to sober and terrify
humanity.

"I guess he was a bigger man than we thought. There was a lot of sense
in what he had to say."

"There sure was," the companion of this speaker answered.

They spoke of him in the past tense. I was seized and obsessed by
the fear that I should never see him again, and at the same moment I
realized sharply that this was th