overnment 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 the one thing I wanted--to see him. I pushed
through the people, gained the street, and