Behind the scenes, however, the Anarchists talked of a very different order of "conspiracy." The funeral rites of the poor little Augustin were performed with as much ceremony and sympathy as an indignant London mob would allow, and he was followed to his grave by a goodly _cortège_ of "comrades," red and black flags and revolutionary song. Among the chief mourners was the deceased man's brother Jacob, who wept copiously into the open grave and sung his "Carmagnole" with inimitable zeal. It was this brother whose conduct had given rise to suspicion among his companions, and "spies" and "police plots" were in every one's mouth. The office of the _Bomb_, as being the centre of English anarchy, had been selected as the scene for an inquiry _en group_ into the matter. Thus on a wet and chilling January evening--one of those evenings when London, and more especially squalid London, is at the height of its unattractiveness--I set out towards my first Anarchist "group-meeting." And certainly the spirit which moved me from within must have been strong that the flesh quailed not at the foul scenery amid which my destination lay. Half-way down one of the busiest, grimiest, and most depressing streets in the W.C. district stands a squalid public-house, the type of many hundreds and thousands of similar dens in the metropolis. The "Myrtle Grove Tavern," pastoral as the name sounds, was not precisely the abode of peace and goodwill. From four A.M., when the first of her _habitués_ began to muster round the yet unopened doors, till half-past twelve P.M., when the last of them was expelled by the sturdy "chucker-out," the atmosphere was dense with the foul breath and still fouler language of drunken and besotted men and women. Every phase of the lower order of British drinker and drunkard was represented here. The coarse oaths of the men, mingled with the shriller voices of their female companions, and the eternal "'e saids" and "she saids" of the latter's complaints and disputes were interrupted by the plaintive wailings of the puny, gin-nourished infants at their breasts. Here, too, sat the taciturn man, clay pipe in mouth, on his accustomed bench day after day, year in year out, gazing with stony and blear-eyed indifference on all that went on around him; deaf, dumb, and unseeing; only spitting deliberately at intervals, and with apparently no other vocation in life than the consumption of fermented liquor.