us, and called upon us passionately to support the candidate who would lift us from our shame.  The fervour of the house rose higher and higher.  Martial music stirred our blood, and made us feel that reform and patriotism were one.  The atmosphere grew tense with expectancy, when suddenly there came a great shout, and the sound of cheering from the crowd in the streets, the crowd which could not force its way into the huge and closely packed opera house.  Now there are few things more profoundly affecting than cheers heard from a distance, or muffled by intervening walls.  They have a fine dramatic quality, unknown to the cheers which rend the air about us.  When the chairman of the meeting announced that the candidate was outside the doors, speaking to the mob, the excitement reached fever heat.  When some one cried, “He is here!” and the orchestra struck the first bars of “Hail Columbia,” we rose to our feet, waving multitudinous flags, and shouting out the rapture of our hearts.

And then,—­and then there stepped upon the stage a plain, tired, bewildered man, betraying nervous exhaustion in every line.  He spoke, and his voice was not the assured voice of a leader.  His words were not the happy words which instantly command attention.  It was evident to the discerning eye that he had been driven for days, perhaps for weeks, beyond his strength and endurance; that he had resorted to stimulants to help him in this emergency, and that they had failed; that he was striving with feeble desperation to do the impossible which was expected of him.  I wondered even then if a few common words of explanation, a few sober words of promise, would not have satisfied the crowd, already sated with eloquence.  I wondered if the unfortunate man could feel the chill settling down upon the house as he spoke his random and undignified sentences, whether he could see the first stragglers slipping down the aisles.  What did his decent record, his honest purpose, avail him in an hour like this?  He tried to lash himself to vigour, but it was spurring a broken-winded horse.  The stragglers increased into a flying squadron, the house was emptying fast, when the chairman in sheer desperation made a sign to the leader of the orchestra, who waved his baton, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” drowned the candidate’s last words, and brought what was left of the audience to its feet.  I turned to a friend beside me, the wife of a local politician who had been the most fiery speaker of the evening.  “Will it make any difference?” I asked, and she answered disconsolately; “The city is lost, but we may save the state.”

Then we went out into the quiet streets, and I bethought me of Voltaire’s driving in a blue coach powdered with gilt stars to see the first production of “Irene,” and of his leaving the theatre to find that enthusiasts had cut the traces of his horses, so that the shouting mob might drag him home in triumph.  But the mob, having done its shouting, melted away after the irresponsible fashion of mobs, leaving the blue coach stranded in front of the Tuileries, with Voltaire shivering inside of it, until the horses could be brought back, the traces patched up, and the driver recalled to his duty.