lves against the hungry? Red-hot applications on their
vile skins--hey? Can't you smell and hear from here the thick hide of
the people burn and sizzle? That's how criminals are made for your
Lombrosos to write their silly stuff about."

The knob of his stick and his legs shook together with passion, whilst
the trunk, draped in the wings of the havelock, preserved his historic
attitude of defiance. He seemed to sniff the tainted air of social
cruelty, to strain his ear for its atrocious sounds. There was an
extraordinary force of suggestion in this posturing. The all but
moribund veteran of dynamite wars had been a great actor in his
time--actor on platforms, in secret assemblies, in private interviews.
The famous terrorist had never in his life raised personally as much as
his little finger against the social edifice. He was no man of action;
he was not even an orator of torrential eloquence, sweeping the masses
along in the rushing noise and foam of a great enthusiasm. With a more
subtle intention, he took the part of an insolent and venomous evoker of
sinister impulses which lurk in the blind envy and exasperated vanity of
ignorance, in the suffering and misery of poverty, in all the hopeful and
noble illusions of righteous anger, pity, and revolt. The shadow of his
evil gift clung to him yet like the smell of a deadly drug in an old vial
of poison, emptied now, useless, ready to be thrown away upon the
rubbish-heap of things that had served their time.

Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle, smiled vaguely with his glued
lips; his pasty moon face drooped under the weight of melancholy assent.
He had been a prisoner himself. His own skin had sizzled under the
red-hot brand, he murmured softly. But Comrade Ossipon, nicknamed the
Doctor, had got over the shock by that time.

"You don't understand," he began disdainfully, but stopped short,
intimidated by the dead blackness of the cavernous eyes in the face
turned slowly towards him with a blind stare, as if guided only by the
sound. He gave the discussion up, with a slight shrug of the shoulders.

Stevie, accustomed to move about disregarded, had got up from the kitchen
table, carrying off his drawing to bed with him. He had reached the
parlour door in time to receive in full the shock of Karl Yundt's
eloquent imagery. The sheet of paper covered with circles dropped out of
his fingers, and he remained staring at the old terrorist, as if rooted
suddenl