Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, and she sank to her seat with a suppressed sob. When at last she rose to speak, her whole personality was a quivering battery of resistless emotion. Her voice, low and pulsing with magnetic waves of suppressed feeling, caught and chained the attention of the farthest straggler on the edge of the throng. Instinctively they moved closer. Resistlessly she drew them. She had not spoken two minutes before she was sweeping the hearts of her hearers. Men and women who had come to laugh or scoff, as well as the young and thoughtless who had drifted with the crowd, were all alike caught in the spell and hung breathless on her words. Every trick and art of persuasive speech were hers without effort. Scorn, pathos, humour, passion, were of the breath she breathed. At times her eloquence reached the highest conception of its might. It was simple thought packed until it took fire. At such moments scores of men leaped to their feet and shouted. Nothing disconcerted her or changed the swift current of her ideas. She was a master-musician whose hands swept a harp of a thousand strings--every string a throbbing human soul. What matter if her appeal was to the emotions and not to the intellect? Her purpose was to persuade her hearers. And she did it. Her courage, her beauty, her skill, her utter sincerity, commanded the respect of the strongest man who listened. If their intellects were not convinced, no matter--she carried them with her on a storm of resistless emotion. Suddenly a thing happened which would have destroyed the total impression of the average speech. Old Methodist John, her pauper protege, had listened with increasing torture, choking down a hundred "Glorys" as they leaped from his soul until at last he could endure no more. At the climax of one of her impassioned appeals the old man leaped to his feet, rushed in front of the speakers' stand and shouted into the face of the chairman: "Look here! Look here, now, Wolf! Soup or no soup--Glory hallelujah!" Barbara alone smiled. The crowd took up his shout, and a thousand voices made the heavens ring with its wild music. Norman whispered to the old man, who sat down, and Barbara swept on in her impetuous triumph without the lapse of a moment's power. She seized the instant's hush which followed the storm of cheering to fire into the minds of her hearers some of the solid shot of the revolutionary programme. In a voice which swelled to the clarion note of a trumpet she cried: "The earth for all the people! This is our demand! "The machinery of all production and distribution for all the people! This is our demand! "The collective ownership and control of all industry! This is our demand! "The elimination of rent, interest, and profit! This is our demand! "A new social order, a higher civilization, a real republic! This is our demand!