Then up and away for another vengeance.  Before them is solitude; shops and stores and residences are closed and barricaded; in the distance teams are seen flying and men scurrying to shelter; and through crevices in shutters the horrified people peer at the mob, as at an invasion of barbarians.

Behind them are dust, confusion, dead bodies, hammered and beaten out of all semblance of humanity; and, worse than all, the criminal classes—­that wretched and inexplicable residuum, who have no grievance against the world except their own existence—­the base, the cowardly, the cruel, the sneaking, the inhuman, the horrible!  These flock like jackals in the track of the lions.  They rob the dead bodies; they break into houses; they kill if they are resisted; they fill their pockets.  Their joy is unbounded.  Elysium has descended upon earth for them this day.  Pickpockets, sneak-thieves, confidence-men, burglars, robbers, assassins, the refuse and outpouring of grog-shops and brothels, all are here.  And women, too—­or creatures that pass for such—­having the bodies of women and the habits of ruffians;—­harpies—­all claws and teeth and greed—­bold—­desperate—­shameless—­incapable of good.  They, too, are here.  They dart hither and thither; they swarm—­they dance—­they howl—­they chatter—­they quarrel and battle, like carrion-vultures, over the spoils.

Civilization is gone, and all the devils are loose!  No more courts, nor judges, nor constables, nor prisons!  That which it took the world ten thousand years to create has gone in an hour.

And still the thunderous cyclones move on through a hundred streets.  Occasionally a house is fired; but this is not part of the programme, for they have decided to keep all these fine residences for themselves!  They will be rich.  They will do no more work.  The rich man’s daughters shall be their handmaidens; they will wear his purple and fine linen.

But now and then the flames rise up—­perhaps a thief kindles the blaze—­and it burns and burns; for who would leave the glorious work to put it out?  It burns until the streets stop it and the block is consumed.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, there is no wind to breed a general conflagration.  The storms to-day are all on earth; and the powers of the air are looking down with hushed breath, horrified at the exceeding wickedness of the little crawlers on the planet we call men.

They do not, as a rule, steal.  Revenge—­revenge—­is all their thought.  And why should they steal?  Is it not all their own?  Now and then a too audacious thief is caught and stuck full of bayonets; or he is flung out of a window, and dies at the hands of the mob the death of the honest man for whom he is mistaken; and thus, by a horrible travesty of fate, he perishes for that which he never was nor could be.

Think of the disgust of a thief who finds himself being murdered for an honest man, an aristocrat, and can get no one to believe his asseverations that he is simply and truly a thief—­and nothing more!  It is enough to make Death grin!