He found that most of the people were going in but one direction, so he followed them. It was a strange country; the soil was coal-dust, the very streams were still with oil, and through every crevice in the earth poured the gas, flaring with wild fire that flamed there night and day. The night was very dark; and at every street corner waved these torches, never quenched, belching fire from the iron tubes stuck anywhere, carelessly, into the ground. A strange country, fitter place for northern runes than modern men; where Loki still lurks in the mountains and the smitten rock gives forth petroleum; and, where the spear or pickaxe strikes the earth, gush still the mythic rills of fire. The crowd went on, to a wild and open hillside above the town. Here perhaps a dozen lengths of pipe were flaring with the natural gas, glowing ruddily and fitfully upon the upturned faces of some dozen thousand men; and at the highest point, below a flaming well of the gas that had been but lately and rudely piped (for the volume of the fire still shot up straight some hundred feet or so, pillaring, like a groined roof, its canopy of smoke), was a sort of rostrum. From this a man was speaking; but his words were hard to hear above the roaring of the burning well. Starbuck knew the man; he was a certain Moses Jablonawski, a Polish Jew. The man was pale and narrow-chested, with a reddish beard; his strongest notes varied from a low hiss to a sort of thin shriek; this last he employed in climaxes, and managed barely to carry his words across the great multitude. But Starbuck knew well what he was saying; he preached simple anarchy, nihilism, resistance to any government or force, destruction of all industrial system, annihilation of all wealth and works. Starbuck had never, even in his secret meetings, gone wholly with the man--(openly, of course, he was a “boss” and on the side of the employers)--for secretly James had rather a greed for the wealth of others than a desire to do without the material things of civilization. But to-night there was something in the cold, logical, merciless reasoning of the Pole that went with his mood. Why dally with the pitch at all? Undoubtedly, if they too got their part of this corruption, they would be just as bad. His sister Jenny spoke to him. _Destroy, destroy_, was the burden of the orator’s speech; _then ask what new thing there shall be, when all is gone. And if it be but suicide, society’s suicide, better that than humanity in misery. The slave must break his chains before he ploughs and sows._ But the most part of the speech was a clever rousing of the passions, among his audience, of hate and envy. He brought their own woe home to them; and painted brilliantly the pleasures of the idle remnant. And always came the refrain, _Kill, kill, destroy, resist all office and authority_--till mankind be as the beasts of the forest once more, lawless, unrestrained; then may they build anew and better, freed from