Francis Robertson, the well-known reporter of the _New York Daily Telegraph_--called the Flying Fish on account of his streaming coat-tails--had been on the go all day. He had scarcely finished dictating the shorthand notes made on his last tour of inspection, to the typewriter, when he received orders--it was at seven o'clock in the evening--to make another trip through the streets and to visit the headquarters of the various national and political societies. First he went to a restaurant a few doors away, and in five minutes succeeded in making way with a steak that had apparently been manufactured out of the hide of a hippopotamus. Then he jumped into a taxicab and directed the chauffeur at the corner of Twenty-ninth Street to drive as quickly as possible through the crowd down Broadway. But it was impossible for the chauffeur on account of the mob to move at more than a snail's pace, and the cab finally came to a dead stop at Madison Square, which was packed with excited people. Robertson left the cab and hurled himself boldly into the seething mass of humanity, but soon discovered that if he wished to make any progress at all he would have to allow himself to be carried forward by the slowly moving crowd. At the corner of Twenty-second Street he managed to disentangle himself and hurried through the block, only to find a new crowd on Fourth Avenue. He intended to cross Fourth Avenue and then push on to Third Avenue, in order to reach Tammany Hall by that route, but he was doomed to disappointment, for the human stream simply carried him down Fourth Avenue as far as Union Square, where it ceased moving for a time. Presently it got under way again, proceeding even more slowly than before, and Robertson soon found himself in the middle of the square, being suddenly pushed against the basin of the fountain upon which he climbed for the double purpose of regaining his breath and of looking around to see if it were possible to make his way through to Tammany Hall. In vain! His eyes were greeted by an interminable sea of heads and hats, which did not offer the slightest chance of his being able to slip through. The trees, the statues and the fountain in the square appeared to be buried to a height of two yards in a black flood. He looked longingly across Sixteenth Street over to Third Avenue, but nowhere could he find an opening. He felt like a ship-wrecked mariner cast ashore on a desert island. The sullen roar of the crowd echoed against the buildings enclosing the square like the dull boom of the surf. Over on Third Avenue the yellow lights of the elevated cars crossed the dark opening of Sixteenth Street at regular intervals, and recalled to Robertson a piece of scenery at a fair, where a lighted train ran continually between the mouths of two tunnels in the mountains. He pulled out his note-book and by the light of the electric arc-lamp made a note of the observation.