Suddenly the inspirer was transformed into the man of affairs who calmly proposed the organization of a strike committee, three members of which were to be chosen by each nationality.  And the resolution, translated into many tongues, was adopted amidst an uproar of enthusiasm.  Until that moment the revolt had been personal, local, founded on a particular grievance which had to do with wages and the material struggle for existence.  Now all was changed; now they were convinced that the deprivation and suffering to which they had pledged themselves were not for selfish ends alone, but also vicarious, dedicated to the liberation of all the downtrodden of the earth.  Antonelli became a saviour; they reached out to touch him as he passed; they trooped into the snowy street, young men and old, and girls, and women holding children in their arms, their faces alight with something never known or felt before.

Such was Antonelli to the strikers.  But to those staid residents of Hampton who had thought themselves still to be living in the old New England tradition, he was the genius of an evil dream.  Hard on his heels came a nightmare troop, whose coming brought to the remembrance of the imaginative the old nursery rhyme:—­“Hark!  Hark!  The dogs do bark, The beggars are come to town.”

It has, indeed, a knell-like ring.  Do philosophies tend also to cast those who adopt them into a mould?  These were of the self-same breed, indubitably the followers of Antonelli.  The men wore their hair long, affected, like their leader, soft felt hats and loose black ties that fell over the lapels of their coats.  Loose morals and loose ties!  The projection of these against a Puritan background ties symbolical of everything the Anglo-Saxon shudders at and abhors; of anarchy and mob rule, of bohemia and vagabondia, of sedition and murder, of Latin revolutions and reigns of terror; of sex irregularity—­not of the clandestine sort to be found in decent communities—­but of free love that flaunts itself in the face of an outraged public.  For there were women in the band.  All this, and more, the invaders suggested—­atheism, unfamiliarity with soap and water, and, more vaguely, an exotic poetry and art that to the virile of American descent is saturated with something indefinable yet abhorrent.  Such things are felt.  Few of the older citizens of Hampton were able to explain why something rose in their gorges, why they experienced a new and clammy quality of fear and repulsion when, on the day following Antonelli’s advent, these strangers arrived from nowhere to install themselves—­with no baggage to speak of —­in Hampton’s more modest but hitherto respectable hostelries.  And no sooner had the city been rudely awakened to the perilous presence, in overwhelming numbers, of ignorant and inflammable foreigners than these turned up and presumed to lead the revolt, to make capital out of it, to interpret it in terms of an exotic and degenerate creed.  Hampton would take care of