Three times they voiced their imperative mandate, and then, at a signal, they wheeled about, and marched away in the excellent order in which they had come. Such a demonstration, in the streets, at night, before a legislative body, had it occurred in a capital or in a metropolis, would have been historic. As it was, the cry that went up from those men was heard in the council chamber; and it was destined to ring through the town for the better part of a decade. The council did not pass the ordinance over the Mayor’s veto; half an hour later the councilmen were escorted from their chamber by the police they had summoned; and a sadly shaken body they were, poor fellows. Meanwhile the men who had marched with Johnson Thurston had retired to a vacant storeroom in Superior Street, three blocks away, over the door of which there was a canvas sign bearing the inscription “INDEPENDENT HEADQUARTERS.” There they had assembled and been drilled by Johnson Thurston, as college men are drilled by a leader in their yells, and with a solemn sense of civic duty they had marched to the council chamber to save their city from a quarter of a century more of shameful vassalage to a privileged public utility corporation. The threat of their presence had been sufficient, but had that proved unavailing, they had provided other resources. There had been all the while, from the hour of the opening of the doors that night, twelve men in the council chamber, armed with bombs, not of dynamite or any such anarchist explosive, but of asafœtida and sulphureted hydrogen and I know not what other overpowering fumes and odors, confidently relied upon to prevail against even so foul a stench as that which a privileged plutocracy can make in any of the halls of government when it has determined to secure another lease of its tenure.