Robertson decided to give up the idea of reaching Tammany Hall and to drift with the crowd to the Chinese quarter. At Astor Place a branch of the human stream carried him to the Bowery, where he found himself on the edge of the crowd and was scraped roughly along the fronts of several houses. He stood this for another block, but determined to escape at the next corner into a side street. Before he could reach it, however, he was crushed violently against the wall of a house and turned round three or four times by the advancing throng; during this maneuver his right coat-tail got caught on something and before he knew it, he had left the coat-tail behind. At last he reached the corner and clung tightly to a railing with his right hand, but the next moment he flew like a cork from a champagne-bottle into the quiet darkness of Fifth Street, bumping violently against several men who had been similarly ejected from the current and who pushed him roughly aside. Robertson was bursting with rage, for just before he had been propelled into Fifth Street, he had caught a glimpse of the grinning face of Bob Traddles, of the _Tribune_, his worst competitor, only a few feet away. The latter showed clearly how delighted he was at this involuntary discomfiture of his rival in the mad race for the latest sensational news. Robertson attempted for a while to get back into the current, but all of his efforts proved futile. Then he tried at least to find out what the people intended to do, and in spite of the contradictory information he received, he was pretty well convinced that they were really going to make an attack on the inhabitants of the Chinese quarter. Although hopelessly separated from Tammany Hall by the countercurrent of the human stream, he at last succeeded in reaching the Eighth Street station of the Second Avenue Elevated, where he took an uptown train to Forty-second Street. Then he walked over to Third Avenue and took a downtown train, which was crowded to suffocation, as far as Grand Street, for the purpose of reaching the Chinese quarter from the uptown side. The trip had consumed fully two hours. At the crossing of Grand and Mott Streets he found the entrance to the latter barred by a line of policemen standing three deep. He showed his badge to a sergeant and received permission to pass. The dead silence of Mott Street seemed almost uncanny after the noisy roar of the mob, the echoes of which still rang in his ears. The basements of the houses were all barricaded with shutters or boards, the doors were locked, and there was scarcely a light to be seen in the windows of the upper stories. A person paying his first visit to this busy, bustling ant-hill of yore would, if he had not been reminded by the peculiar penetrating smell of the yellow race of their proximity, scarcely have believed that he was really in the notorious Chinese quarter of New York.