Little by little the various groups dissolved, the speakers and their friends forcing their “literatoor” upon the passers-by, who generally appeared to look into the air a foot or two above their heads, as they went homewards through the streets. The Anarchists were the last to leave, a faithful few still congregating around a youth in a red necktie who denounced the other speakers with impartiality, averring that they were “humbugs every one of them,” and, for his part, he believed only in dynamite, by means of which he hoped some day to be able to devote “all the blood-suckers to destruction, and thus to bring about the reign of brotherhood.” The little knot of the elect applauded loudly, and the youth, catching the policeman’s eye fixed on him, descended hurriedly from off the chair on which he had been perorating, remarking that “it was time to be going home to have a bit of dinner, as he was due to speak at Salford in the evening.” Slowly the square was emptied, the last group or two of people disappearing into the mouths of the incoming streets just as a Roman crowd must have been swallowed up in the vomitoria of an amphitheatre, after a show of gladiators. Torn newspapers and ends of cigarettes were the sole result of all the rhetoric that had been poured out so liberally upon the assembled thousands in the square. Two or three street boys in their shirt-sleeves, bare-footed and bare-headed, their trousers held up by a piece of string, played about listlessly, after the fashion of their kind on Sunday in a manufacturing town, when the life of the streets is dead, and when men’s minds are fixed either upon the mysteries of the faith or upon beer, things in which children have but little share. The usual Sabbath gloom was creeping on the town and dinner-time approaching, when from a corner of the square appeared a man advancing rapidly. He glanced about inquiringly, and for a moment a look of disappointment crossed his face. Mounting the steps that lead up to the smoke-coated Areopagus, he stopped just for an instant, as if to draw his breath and gather his ideas. Decently dressed in shabby black, his trousers frayed a little above the heels of his elastic-sided boots, his soft felt hat that covered long but scanty hair just touched with grey, he had an air as of a plaster figure set in the middle of a pond, as he stood silhouetted against the background of the buildings, forlorn yet resolute. The urchins, who had gathered round him, had a look upon their faces as of experienced critics at a play; that look of expectation and subconscious irony which characterises all their kind at public spectacles.