It was an extraordinary assemblage that greeted my eyes; a long array of stern faces, dark and toil-hardened, with great, broad brows and solemn or sinister eyes.

Last night I had beheld the council of the Plutocracy.  Here was the council of the Proletariat.  The large heads at one end of the line were matched by the large heads at the other.  A great injustice, or series of wrongs, working through many generations, had wrought out results that in some sense duplicated each other.  Brutality above had produced brutality below; cunning there was answered by cunning here; cruelty in the aristocrat was mirrored by cruelty in the workman.  High and low were alike victims—­unconscious victims—­of a system.  The crime was not theirs; it lay at the door of the shallow, indifferent, silly generations of the past.

My eyes sought the officers.  I noticed that Maximilian was disguised—­out of an excess of caution, as I supposed—­with eye-glasses and a large dark mustache.  His face, I knew, was really beardless.

I turned to the president.  Such a man I had never seen before.  He was, I should think, not less than six feet six inches high, and broad in proportion.  His great arms hung down until the monstrous hands almost touched the knees.  His skin was quite dark, almost negroid; and a thick, close mat of curly black hair covered his huge head like a thatch.  His face was muscular, ligamentous; with great bars, ridges and whelks of flesh, especially about the jaws and on the forehead.  But the eyes fascinated me.  They were the eyes of a wild beast, deep-set, sullen and glaring; they seemed to shine like those of the cat-tribe, with a luminosity of their own.  This, then—­I said to myself—­must be Caesar, the commander of the dreaded Brotherhood.

A movement attracted me to the man who sat below him; he had spoken to the president.

He was in singular contrast with his superior.  He was old and withered.  One hand seemed to be shrunken, and his head was permanently crooked to one side.  The face was mean and sinister; two fangs alone remained in his mouth; his nose was hooked; the eyes were small, sharp, penetrating and restless; but the expanse of brow above them was grand and noble.  It was one of those heads that look as if they had been packed full, and not an inch of space wasted.  His person was unclean, however, and the hands and the long finger-nails were black with dirt.  I should have picked him out anywhere as a very able and a very dangerous man.  He was evidently the vice-president of whom the spy had spoken—­the nameless Russian Jew who was accounted “the brains of the Brotherhood.”

“Gabriel Weltstein,” said the giant, in the same stern, loud voice, “each person in this room will now pass before you,—­the officers last; and,—­under the solemn oath you have taken,—­I call upon you to say whether the spy you saw last night in the council-chamber of the Prince of Cabano is among them.  But first, let me ask, did you see him clearly, and do you think you will be able to identify him?”