I love this corner of the great city; I love the sense of the warm human tide flowing all about me.  I love to look into the strange, dark, eager, sensitive, blunt faces.

The other noon, drifting there in that human eddy, I stopped to listen to a small, shabby man who stood in transitory eminence upon his soap box, half his body reaching above the knobby black soil of human heads around him—­black, knobby soil that he was seeking, there in the spring sunshine, to plough with strange ideas.  He had ruddy cheeks and a tuft of curly hair set like an upholstery button on each side of his bald head.  The front teeth in his upper jaw were missing, and as he opened his mouth one could see the ample lining of red flannel.

He raised his voice penetratingly to overcome the noise of the world, straining until the dark-corded veins of his throat stood out sharply and perspiration gleamed on his bald forehead.  As though his life depended upon the delivery of his great message he was explaining to that close-packed crowd that there was no God.

From time to time he offered for sale pamphlets by R.G.  Ingersoll and Frederic Harrison, with grimy back numbers of a journal called the “Truth-Seeker.”

By the slant and timbre of his speech he was an Englishman; he had a gift of vigorous statement, and met questioners like an intellectual pugilist with skilful blows between the eyes:  and his grammar was bad.

I stood for some time listening to him while he proved with excellent logic, basing his reasoning on many learned authorities, that there was no God.  His audience cheered with glee his clever hits, and held up their hands for the books he had for sale.

“Who is this speaker?” I asked the elbowing helper who came through the crowd to deliver the speaker’s wares and collect the silver for them.  “Who is this speaker who says there is no God?”

“Henry Moore,” he responded.

“And who,” I asked, “is Henry Moore?”

“He is an Englishman and was brought up a Presbyterian—­but he seen the light.”

“And no longer thinks there is any God?”

“Nope.”

“And these books prove the same thing?”

“Yep.”

So I bought one of them, thinking it wonderful that proof of so momentous a conclusion could be had for so small a sum.

This Henry Moore could fling arguments like thunderbolts; he could marshall his authorities like an army; he could talk against the roar of the city and keep his restless audience about him; and if he did not believe in God he had complete faith in Haeckel and Jacques Loeb, and took at face value the lightest utterances of John Stuart Mill.

I enjoyed listening to Henry Moore.  I enjoyed looking into the faces all around me—­mostly keen foreign or half-foreign faces, and young faces, and idle faces, and curious faces, and faces that drank in, and faces that disdainfully rejected.