o the decencies and the charities of Christendom. His
youthful prank of being a policeman had faded from his mind; he did not
think of himself as the representative of the corps of gentlemen turned
into fancy constables, or of the old eccentric who lived in the dark
room. But he did feel himself as the ambassador of all these common and
kindly people in the street, who every day marched into battle to the
music of the barrel-organ. And this high pride in being human had lifted
him unaccountably to an infinite height above the monstrous men around
him. For an instant, at least, he looked down upon all their sprawling
eccentricities from the starry pinnacle of the commonplace. He felt
towards them all that unconscious and elementary superiority that a
brave man feels over powerful beasts or a wise man over powerful errors.
He knew that he had neither the intellectual nor the physical strength
of President Sunday; but in that moment he minded it no more than the
fact that he had not the muscles of a tiger or a horn on his nose like
a rhinoceros. All was swallowed up in an ultimate certainty that the
President was wrong and that the barrel-organ was right. There clanged
in his mind that unanswerable and terrible truism in the song of
Roland--

"Pagens ont tort et Chretiens ont droit."

which in the old nasal French has the clang and groan of great iron.
This liberation of his spirit from the load of his weakness went with a
quite clear decision to embrace death. If the people of the barrel-organ
could keep their old-world obligations, so could he. This very pride in
keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his
last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and
die for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ
seemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises
of a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the
trumpets of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death.

The conspirators were already filing through the open window and into
the rooms behind. Syme went last, outwardly calm, but with all his brain
and body throbbing with romantic rhythm. The President led them down an
irregular side stair, such as might be used by servants, and into a dim,
cold, empty room, with a table and benches, like an abandoned boardroom.
When they were all in, he closed and locked the door.

The first to speak was Gogol, t