Next day was to be the great mass-meeting in celebration of the Russian revolution; and would you believe it, Lizzie was hoping to persuade Jimmie to stay away; she had brought Mr. Drew to help persuade him!  Poor Lizzie had visions of everybody in the hall being carted off to jail, of Jimmie getting up and shouting something, causing the police to fall on him and beat in his skull with their clubs.  It was in vain he declared that he was going to do nothing more romantic than sell literature and act as usher.  She clasped him in her arms, weeping copiously, and when he was still obdurate, she declared that she would go with him.  She would try to persuade Mrs. Drew to take care of the babies for one night.

Old Peter Drew answered that he would be interested to attend the meeting himself.  How would it do for him to come for Lizzie and the little ones, and leave the latter at his home, and then drive with Lizzie to the meeting?  They could meet Jimmie at the Opera-house, where he would be spending the day decorating.  Then after the meeting they could all drive back together.  “Fine!” said Jimmie, who had visions of the old soldier becoming infected with revolutionary fever.

But alas, it did not work out that way.  To Jimmie’s consternation the old man turned up at the Opera-house in a faded blue uniform with brass buttons all over it!  Everybody stared, of course; and they stared all the harder because they saw this military personage in company with Comrade Higgins.  The old boy gazed about at the swarms of people, many of them with red buttons, the women with red ribbons or sashes; he gazed at the decorations—­the huge flag and the long red streamers, the banner of the Karl Marx Verein, and the banner of the Ypsels, or Young Peoples’ Socialist League of Leesville, and the banner of the Machinists’ Union, Local 4717, and of the Carpenters’ Union, District 529, and of the Workers’ Co-operative Society.  He turned to Jimmie and said, “Where’s the American flag?”

The Liederkranz sang the Marseillaise, and after the audience had cheered and waved red handkerchiefs and shouted itself hoarse, Comrade Gerrity, the chairman, made a little speech.  For many years all Socialists had been accustomed to employ a metaphor by which to describe conditions in their country, and now they would no longer be able to use it, for Russia was free, and America would follow her example when she had the sense.  He introduced Comrade Pavel Michaelovitch, who had come all the way from New York to tell them the meaning of the greatest event of history.  Comrade Pavel, a slender, frail, scholarly-looking man with a black beard and black-rimmed spectacles, said a few words in Russian, and then he talked for an hour in broken English, explaining how the Russians had won their way to freedom, and now would use it to set free the rest of the proletariat.  And then came Comrade Schultze, of the Carpet Weavers’ Union, assuring them that there was no need to go to war with Germany, because the German workers had been shown the way to freedom, and would follow very soon; Schultze knew, because his brother was editor of a Socialist paper in Leipzig, and he had inside information as to what was going on in the Fatherland.