aining his breath and of looking
around to see if it were possible to make his way through to Tammany
Hall. In vain! His eyes were greeted by an interminable sea of heads and
hats, which did not offer the slightest chance of his being able to slip
through. The trees, the statues and the fountain in the square appeared
to be buried to a height of two yards in a black flood. He looked
longingly across Sixteenth Street over to Third Avenue, but nowhere
could he find an opening.

He felt like a ship-wrecked mariner cast ashore on a desert island. The
sullen roar of the crowd echoed against the buildings enclosing the
square like the dull boom of the surf. Over on Third Avenue the yellow
lights of the elevated cars crossed the dark opening of Sixteenth Street
at regular intervals, and recalled to Robertson a piece of scenery at a
fair, where a lighted train ran continually between the mouths of two
tunnels in the mountains. He pulled out his note-book and by the light
of the electric arc-lamp made a note of the observation.

Then he jumped down from the ledge where he had taken refuge and once
more joined the human stream. The latter, as if animated by a common
purpose, was moving downtown, and if Robertson's neighbors were properly
posted, it was headed for the Chinese quarter. It was evident that they
intended to vent their fury for the present on these allies of the
Japanese. This longing for revenge, this elementary hatred of the yellow
race kept the crowd in Union Square in motion and shoved everyone
without discrimination towards Broadway and Fourth Avenue. The square
resembled a huge machine, which by means of some hidden automatic power
forced tens of thousands of unresisting bodies into the narrow channels.
The crowd rolled on unceasingly. Here and there a hat flew off into the
air, came down again, bobbed up and down once or twice, and then
continued its journey somewhere else on the surface. It was fortunate
that those who had become insensible from the dreadful noise and the
foul, dusty air were unable to fall down; they were simply held up by
the close pressure of their neighbors and were carried along until a few
blocks farther on they regained consciousness. Nevertheless a few fell
and disappeared in the stream without leaving a trace behind them. No
pen could describe their terrible fate; they must have been relentlessly
ground to pieces like stones on the rocky bed of a glacier.

Above this roaring stream