of human beings there swept unceasingly, in
short blasts like a tearing whirlwind, the hoarse cry of a people's
passion: "Down with the yellow race! Down with the Japanese! Three
cheers for the Stars and Stripes!" The passionate cry of a crowd
thirsting for revenge rose again and again, as if from a giant's lungs,
until the cheers and yells of "down" turned into a wild, deafening,
inarticulate howl which was echoed and re-echoed a thousand times by the
tall buildings on both sides of the avenue. Now and then an electric
street-car, to which clung hundreds of people, towered like a stranded
vessel above the waving mass of heads and hats.

Robertson decided to give up the idea of reaching Tammany Hall and to
drift with the crowd to the Chinese quarter. At Astor Place a branch of
the human stream carried him to the Bowery, where he found himself on
the edge of the crowd and was scraped roughly along the fronts of
several houses. He stood this for another block, but determined to
escape at the next corner into a side street. Before he could reach it,
however, he was crushed violently against the wall of a house and turned
round three or four times by the advancing throng; during this maneuver
his right coat-tail got caught on something and before he knew it, he
had left the coat-tail behind. At last he reached the corner and clung
tightly to a railing with his right hand, but the next moment he flew
like a cork from a champagne-bottle into the quiet darkness of Fifth
Street, bumping violently against several men who had been similarly
ejected from the current and who pushed him roughly aside.

Robertson was bursting with rage, for just before he had been propelled
into Fifth Street, he had caught a glimpse of the grinning face of Bob
Traddles, of the _Tribune_, his worst competitor, only a few feet away.
The latter showed clearly how delighted he was at this involuntary
discomfiture of his rival in the mad race for the latest sensational
news. Robertson attempted for a while to get back into the current, but
all of his efforts proved futile. Then he tried at least to find out
what the people intended to do, and in spite of the contradictory
information he received, he was pretty well convinced that they were
really going to make an attack on the inhabitants of the Chinese
quarter. Although hopelessly separated from Tammany Hall by the
countercurrent of the human stream, he at last succeeded in reaching the
Eighth Street st