At Madison square the car swung to the left of the Flatiron’s sharp prow and took its course down Broadway, and when it reached Union square the spring sunlight was shining softly on the spot which has often served as the people’s forum.  At the north end a crowd had gathered and from a drygoods box a speaker was haranguing them.  From the violence of the gestures and the truculence of the voice whose words did not reach him, Hamilton Burton knew that it was an agitator whose burden was the hardness of the times and the inequality of living conditions.  His lips shaped themselves for an instant into a smile of satirical amusement.  One who held his fingers so constantly on the pulse of finance was not in ignorance of the feverish heat that burned through the nation’s arteries.  He knew that a rumble of protest was rising from the Battery to the Golden Gate and that this rumble might be the warning thunder that runs ahead of a panic’s hurricane.

But, as his car was passing the crowd, he found himself looking out across the near heads of the listeners, and upon all the faces he read a sullen discontent.  Some of those men, he surmised, had waited their turns in the bread line.  Some of them came from lodgings where larders were empty.

The chauffeur had swung east to take the more open way and even here he had to throttle down his gas because of the scattered loungers who had overflowed the curb.  One man of tramp-like appearance stepped directly in front of the radiator and at the warning of the horn made no effort to seek safety.  He swaggered along with insolent manner at snail’s pace, so that the driver, with a muttered imprecation, brought the car to a jerking halt, and even then almost grazed with his fender the frayed sleeve of the trouble-maker.

In Union square, as on Riverside Drive, the foliage was tenderly green and the sunlight was a golden smile.  Pushcarts freighted with potted plants and fruit gave scraps of festal color, and a stand canopied with a yellow-and-blue umbrella offered pies and sandwiches for sale.

But the crowd itself was colorless and somber of mood, and as the car stopped the speaker pointed to it with a passion-shaken hand, so that its principal occupant knew that he was recognized and being made the target of a verbal onslaught.  Those men standing nearest turned and gazed at him with an idle curiosity.  They were seeing a multi-millionaire at close range.  But from a few near the center of the throng came jeers and shouts of insult for the man whom they chose to regard as a representative of Capital’s tyranny.  A black-visaged malcontent of humorless eyes made his way to the margin of the gathering and, with a pie for which he neglected to pay, opened a fusillade upon the rich man’s car.  After that came an orange or two contributed by some one whose position was strategically close to the fruit-vender’s cart and at last a sounder missile struck and shivered the wind-shield.