oked from table to table, and sometimes the
whole room would quiet down while some one told a joke, which invariably
wound up with a roar of laughter.

"Why," I said, "these people have a whole life, a whole society, of
their own!"

In the midst of this jollity the clear voice of a girl rang out with the
first lines of a song. Instantly the room was hushed:

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,
Arise, ye wretched of the earth,
For justice thunders condemnation
A better world's in birth.

These were the words she sang, and when the clear, sweet voice died
down the whole company, as though by a common impulse, arose from their
chairs, and joined in a great swelling chorus:

It is the final conflict,
Let each stand in his place,
The Brotherhood of Man
Shall be the human race.

It was beyond belief, to me, the spirit with which these words were
sung. In no sense with jollity--all that seemed to have been dropped
when they came to their feet--but with an unmistakable fervour of faith.
Some of the things I had thought and dreamed about secretly among the
hills of my farm all these years, dreamed about as being something far
off and as unrealizable as the millennium, were here being sung abroad
with jaunty faith by these weavers of Kilburn, these weavers and workers
whom I had schooled myself to regard with a sort of distant pity.

Hardly had the company sat down again, with a renewal of the flow of
jolly conversation When I heard a rapping on one of the tables. I saw
the great form of R----- D----- slowly rising.

"Brothers and sisters," he said, "a word of caution. The authorities
will lose no chance of putting us in the wrong. Above all we must
comport ourselves here and in the strike with great care. We are
fighting a great battle, bigger than we are--"

At this instant the door from the dark hallway suddenly opened and a
man in a policeman's uniform stepped in. There fell an instant's dead
silence--an explosive silence. Every person there seemed to be petrified
in the position in which his attention was attracted. Every eye was
fixed on the figure at the door. For an instant no one said a word; then
I heard a woman's shrill voice, like a rifle-shot:

"Assassin!"

I cannot imagine what might have happened next, for the feeling in the
room, as in the city itself, was at the tensest, had not the leader
suddenly brought the goblet which he held in his hand down with a bang