he irreconcilable, who seemed bursting
with inarticulate grievance.

"Zso! Zso!" he cried, with an obscure excitement, his heavy Polish
accent becoming almost impenetrable. "You zay you nod 'ide. You zay you
show himselves. It is all nuzzinks. Ven you vant talk importance you run
yourselves in a dark box!"

The President seemed to take the foreigner's incoherent satire with
entire good humour.

"You can't get hold of it yet, Gogol," he said in a fatherly way. "When
once they have heard us talking nonsense on that balcony they will not
care where we go afterwards. If we had come here first, we should have
had the whole staff at the keyhole. You don't seem to know anything
about mankind."

"I die for zem," cried the Pole in thick excitement, "and I slay zare
oppressors. I care not for these games of gonzealment. I would zmite ze
tyrant in ze open square."

"I see, I see," said the President, nodding kindly as he seated himself
at the top of a long table. "You die for mankind first, and then you get
up and smite their oppressors. So that's all right. And now may I ask
you to control your beautiful sentiments, and sit down with the other
gentlemen at this table. For the first time this morning something
intelligent is going to be said."

Syme, with the perturbed promptitude he had shown since the original
summons, sat down first. Gogol sat down last, grumbling in his brown
beard about gombromise. No one except Syme seemed to have any notion of
the blow that was about to fall. As for him, he had merely the feeling
of a man mounting the scaffold with the intention, at any rate, of
making a good speech.

"Comrades," said the President, suddenly rising, "we have spun out this
farce long enough. I have called you down here to tell you something so
simple and shocking that even the waiters upstairs (long inured to our
levities) might hear some new seriousness in my voice. Comrades, we were
discussing plans and naming places. I propose, before saying anything
else, that those plans and places should not be voted by this meeting,
but should be left wholly in the control of some one reliable member. I
suggest Comrade Saturday, Dr. Bull."

They all stared at him; then they all started in their seats, for the
next words, though not loud, had a living and sensational emphasis.
Sunday struck the table.

"Not one word more about the plans and places must be said at this
meeting. Not one tiny detail more about what we mean to