over us, satiated and calm, live the rich. In order that we should
obey the police, the authorities, the soldiers, all are in their hands,
all are against us, everything is against us. We perish all our lives
day after day in toil, always in filth, in deceit. And others enjoy
themselves and gormandize themselves with our labor; and they hold us
like dogs on chains, in ignorance. We know nothing, and in terror we
fear everything. Our life is night, a dark night; it is a terrible
dream. They have poisoned us with strong intoxicating poison, and they
drink our blood. They glut themselves to corpulence, to vomiting--the
servants of the devil of greed. Is it not so?"

"It's so!" came a dull answer.

Back of the crowd the mother noticed the spy and two gendarmes. She
hastened to give away the last bundles; but when her hand let itself
down into the valise it met another strange hand.

"Take it, take it all!" she said, bending down.

A dirty face raised itself to hers, and a low whisper reached her:

"Whom shall I tell? Whom inform?"

She did not answer.

"In order to change this life, in order to free all the people, to
raise them from the dead, as I have been raised, some persons have
already come who secretly saw the truth in life; secretly, because, you
know, no one can say the truth aloud. They hunt you down, they stifle
you; they make you rot in prison, they mutilate you. Wealth is a
force, not a friend to truth. Thus far truth is the sworn enemy to the
power of the rich, an irreconcilable enemy forever! Our children are
carrying the truth into the world. Bright people, clean people are
carrying it to you. Thus far there are few of them; they are not
powerful; but they grow in number every day. They put their young
hearts into free truth, they are making it an invincible power. Along
the route of their hearts it will enter into our hard life; it will
warm us, enliven us, emancipate us from the oppression of the rich and
from all who have sold their souls. Believe this."

"Out of the way here!" shouted the gendarmes, pushing the people. They
gave way to the jostling unwillingly, pressed the gendarmes with their
mass, hindered them perhaps without desiring to do so. The gray-haired
woman with the large, honest eyes in her kind face attracted them
powerfully; and those whom life held asunder, whom it tore from one
another, now blended into a whole, warmed by the fire of the fearless
words which, pe