ing. Why don't you try
breathing outdoors sometime? You might like it if you ever made the
experiment."

Paul only shook his head. He could never argue with Hamilton and yet on
one or two subjects he was gently and immovably stubborn. So the older
brother shrugged his shoulders and changed the subject.

"What progress with the new organ?" he inquired.

The responsive face lighted and weariness gave place to the glow of
enthusiasm. Hamilton was installing at the younger man's quarters a
splendid music-room with such an organ as might have graced a cathedral.
There the ardent composer might shut himself off with the swelling
strains of his own music and fare out on the far tide of his dreams.

At Madison square the car swung to the left of the Flatiron's sharp prow
and took its course down Broadway, and when it reached Union square the
spring sunlight was shining softly on the spot which has often served as
the people's forum. At the north end a crowd had gathered and from a
drygoods box a speaker was haranguing them. From the violence of the
gestures and the truculence of the voice whose words did not reach him,
Hamilton Burton knew that it was an agitator whose burden was the
hardness of the times and the inequality of living conditions. His lips
shaped themselves for an instant into a smile of satirical amusement.
One who held his fingers so constantly on the pulse of finance was not
in ignorance of the feverish heat that burned through the nation's
arteries. He knew that a rumble of protest was rising from the Battery
to the Golden Gate and that this rumble might be the warning thunder
that runs ahead of a panic's hurricane.

But, as his car was passing the crowd, he found himself looking out
across the near heads of the listeners, and upon all the faces he read a
sullen discontent. Some of those men, he surmised, had waited their
turns in the bread line. Some of them came from lodgings where larders
were empty.

The chauffeur had swung east to take the more open way and even here he
had to throttle down his gas because of the scattered loungers who had
overflowed the curb. One man of tramp-like appearance stepped directly
in front of the radiator and at the warning of the horn made no effort
to seek safety. He swaggered along with insolent manner at snail's pace,
so that the driver, with a muttered imprecation, brought the car to a
jerking halt, and even then almost grazed with his fender the frayed
sleeve of