inspirer was transformed into the man of affairs who calmly
proposed the organization of a strike committee, three members of which
were to be chosen by each nationality. And the resolution, translated
into many tongues, was adopted amidst an uproar of enthusiasm. Until that
moment the revolt had been personal, local, founded on a particular
grievance which had to do with wages and the material struggle for
existence. Now all was changed; now they were convinced that the
deprivation and suffering to which they had pledged themselves were not
for selfish ends alone, but also vicarious, dedicated to the liberation
of all the downtrodden of the earth. Antonelli became a saviour; they
reached out to touch him as he passed; they trooped into the snowy
street, young men and old, and girls, and women holding children in their
arms, their faces alight with something never known or felt before.

Such was Antonelli to the strikers. But to those staid residents of
Hampton who had thought themselves still to be living in the old New
England tradition, he was the genius of an evil dream. Hard on his heels
came a nightmare troop, whose coming brought to the remembrance of the
imaginative the old nursery rhyme:--"Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark, The
beggars are come to town."

It has, indeed, a knell-like ring. Do philosophies tend also to cast
those who adopt them into a mould? These were of the self-same breed,
indubitably the followers of Antonelli. The men wore their hair long,
affected, like their leader, soft felt hats and loose black ties that
fell over the lapels of their coats. Loose morals and loose ties! The
projection of these against a Puritan background ties symbolical of
everything the Anglo-Saxon shudders at and abhors; of anarchy and mob
rule, of bohemia and vagabondia, of sedition and murder, of Latin
revolutions and reigns of terror; of sex irregularity--not of the
clandestine sort to be found in decent communities--but of free love that
flaunts itself in the face of an outraged public. For there were women in
the band. All this, and more, the invaders suggested--atheism,
unfamiliarity with soap and water, and, more vaguely, an exotic poetry
and art that to the virile of American descent is saturated with
something indefinable yet abhorrent. Such things are felt. Few of the
older citizens of Hampton were able to explain why something rose in
their gorges, why they experienced a new and clammy quality of fear and
repul