The building was cleared, and at last Merwyn, exhausted and panting, came back with his comrades and took his place in the ranks.  His club was bloody, and his revolver empty.  The force marched away in triumph escorting wagons loaded with all the arms they could find, and were cheered by the better-disposed spectators that remained on the scene of action.

The desperate tenacity of the mob is shown by the fact that it returned to the wire factory, found some boxes of arms that had been overlooked, filled the great five-story building and the street about it, and became so defiant that the same battle had to be fought again in the afternoon with the aid of the military.

For the sake of making a definite impression we have touched upon the conflicts taking place in one locality.  But throughout this awful day there were mobs all over the city, with fighting, plundering, burning, the chasing and murdering of negroes occurring at the same time in many and widely separated sections.  Telegrams for aid were pouring into headquarters from all parts of the city, large tracts of which were utterly unprotected.  The police and military could be employed only in bodies sufficiently large to cope with gatherings of hundreds or thousands.  Individual outrages and isolated instances of violence and plunder could not be prevented.

But law-abiding citizens were realizing their danger and awakening to a sense of their duty.  Over four hundred special policemen were sworn in.  Merchants and bankers in Wall Street met and resolved to close business.  Millionnaires vied with their clerks and porters in patriotic readiness to face danger.  Volunteer companies were formed, and men like Hon. William E. Dodge, always foremost in every good effort in behalf of the city, left their offices for military duty.  While thousands of citizens escaped from the city, with their families, not knowing where they would find a refuge, and obeying only the impulse to get away from a place apparently doomed, other thousands remained, determined to protect their hearths and homes and to preserve their fair metropolis from destruction.  Terrible as was the mob, and tenfold more terrible as it would have been if it had used its strength in an organized effort and with definite purpose, forces were now awakening and concentrating against it which would eventually destroy every vestige of lawlessness.  With the fight on Broadway, during Monday evening, the supreme crisis had passed.  After that the mob fought desperate but losing battles.  Acton, with Napoleonic nerve and skill, had time to plan and organize.  General Brown with his brave troops reached him on Monday night, and thereafter the two men, providentially brought and kept together, met and overcame, in cordial co-operation, every danger as it arose.  Their names should never be forgotten by the citizens of New York.  Acton, as chief of police, was soon feared more than any other man in the city, and he