His audacity made an impression. The discontented cowered timidly in
their places.

"_Yes_," rolled back from the assembly, proud of its English
monosyllables.

"_Nein_," cried a solitary voice from the topmost gallery.

Instantly the assembly was on its legs, eyeing the dissentient angrily.
"Get down! Go on the platform!" mingled with cries of "order" from the
Chairman, who in vain summoned him on to the stage. The dissentient
waved a roll of paper violently and refused to modify his standpoint. He
was evidently speaking, for his jaws were making movements, which in the
din and uproar could not rise above grimaces. There was a battered high
hat on the back of his head, and his hair was uncombed, and his face
unwashed. At last silence was restored and the tirade became audible.

"Cursed sweaters--capitalists--stealing men's brains--leaving us to rot
and starve in darkness and filth. Curse them! Curse them!" The speaker's
voice rose to a hysterical scream, as he rambled on.

Some of the men knew him and soon there flew from lip to lip, "Oh, it's
only _Meshuggene David_."

Mad Davy was a gifted Russian university student, who had been mixed up
with nihilistic conspiracies and had fled to England where the struggle
to find employ for his clerical talents had addled his brain. He had a
gift for chess and mechanical invention, and in the early days had saved
himself from starvation by the sale of some ingenious patents to a
swaggering co-religionist who owned race-horses and a music-hall, but he
sank into squaring the circle and inventing perpetual motion. He lived
now on the casual crumbs of indigent neighbors, for the charitable
organizations had marked him "dangerous." He was a man of infinite
loquacity, with an intense jealousy of Simon Wolf or any such
uninstructed person who assumed to lead the populace, but when the
assembly accorded him his hearing he forgot the occasion of his rising
in a burst of passionate invective against society.

When the irrelevancy of his remarks became apparent, he was rudely
howled down and his neighbors pulled him into his seat, where he
gibbered and mowed inaudibly.

Wolf continued his address.

"_Sind sie zufrieden mit ihrer Secretary_?"

This time there was no dissent. The _"Yes"_ came like thunder.

"_Sind sie zufrieden mit ihrer Treasurer_?"

_Yeas_ and _nays_ mingled. The question of the retention, of the
functionary was put to the vote. But there was much confusion,