well for the general himself and all concerned. The head officials, who were unseen watching from a distance the entrance of the half-hearted and demoralised men, drew a sigh of relief, for they felt the real and graver danger was over. The news rapidly spread that the City men had gone in to work; and the effect was spontaneous almost everywhere throughout the districts, except at the Eastern District Office. The Northern men and the South-Eastern men, who had taken up a very firm attitude, almost immediately went in. But at one or two other places, Finsbury Park, and Holloway, the men refused to go out on delivery, and were promptly suspended. The only important contingent who took the extreme step in a body were the Eastern District men. These, reinforced by driblets from other sources, made up a body of about three hundred, who by a woeful misunderstanding and want of information had refused to take up their duties. They marched in order to the General Post-Office, expecting there to find the various other districts assembled in triumphant defiance. These misguided men marched in a solid body towards the City, and instead of being greeted as they expected by the welcoming shouts of the whole of the district and City postmen in possession of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, found the grim grey General Post-Office standing amidst solitude and silence. Except for the police on duty, and the few wondering pedestrians, the streets were deserted at that early hour; and then, after standing still and wondering for a few seconds, they understood. It was now close on six o’clock in the morning; they could hear the steady clank, clank of the stamping machines within the great crowded hive, and to these men who had risked all for an ideal, it seemed like intended mockery at their foolishness. They began to realise that they had grasped at the shadow, and lost the substance. Impelled by mingled feelings of hope, despair, and rage, they, as with one accord, wheeled into regimental order, and circled in a moving body round the General Post-Office. Round and round they circled, again and again breaking forth into soulless and dispirited cheers to attract those safe within. Nothing more pathetic can be imagined than those cheers, which were but as a voice crying in the wilderness, and flung back to them in echo from the granite walls towering above them. With the police at their heels, and ruin confronting them, they despairingly kept on the move for one weary hour or more, threading the narrow thoroughfares which irregularly surround the General Post-Office; and the cheers, at first of simulated defiance, now died away in almost a piteous groan. Then at last the City police, taking stern action, prevented them from demonstrating any further; and the wretched heart-broken remnant of the strike army gradually melted away towards the East, whence, in the sunrise, they had emerged so hopeful and so triumphant in anticipation.