examine his credentials. He had failed at every enterprise he had
undertaken. And then he suddenly discovered his power over the Puritan
imagination.

To Brown's mind, from the day of his devotion to the fixed idea
of destroying Slavery in the South, "Action" had but one
meaning--bloodshed. He knew that revolutionary ideas are matters of
belief. He asserted beliefs. The elect believed. The damned refused to
believe.

Long before Smith had entered the room Brown had dropped into a seat by
the window, his eyes two pin points. His abstraction was so deep, his
absorption in his dreams so complete that when Smith spoke, he leaped to
his feet and put himself in an attitude of defense.

He gazed at his friend a moment and rubbed his eyes in a dazed way
before he could come back to earth.

In a moment he had clasped hands with the philanthropist. Smith looked
into his eyes and his will was one with the man of Action. He had not
yet grasped the full meaning of the Action. He was to awake later to
its tremendous import--primitive, barbaric, animal, linking man through
hundreds of thousands of years to the beast who was his jungle father.

Smith did not know that he was to preside at the meeting until Brown
told him. He consented without a moment's hesitation.

CHAPTER XII

On their way to the hall on the Bowery Gerrit Smith and John Brown
passed through dimly lighted streets along which were drifting scores of
boys and girls, ragged, friendless, homeless, shelterless in the chill
night. The strange old man's eyes were fixed on space. He saw nothing,
heard nothing of the city's roaring life or the call of its fathomless
misery.

He saw nothing even when they passed a house with a red light before
which little girls of twelve were selling flowers. Neither of the men,
living for a single fixed idea, caught the accent of evil in the child's
voice as she stepped squarely in front of them and said:

"What's ye hurry?"

When they turned aside she piped again:

"Won't ye come in?"

They merely passed on. The infinite pathos of the scene had made no
impression. That this child's presence on the streets was enough to
damn the whole system of society to the lowest hell never dawned on the
philanthropist or the man of Action.

The crowd in the hall was not large. The place was about half full and
it seated barely five hundred. The masses of the North as yet took no
stock in the Abolition Crusade.

They felt the terr