There is nothing like personal contact with a thing to make you understand its reality, and when the revolution knocked my hat off into the road I felt myself faced with no idle dream. There was something about the top-hat of the common or garden clerk that angered the revolutionists, and they did not seem to recognise in me a toiler like themselves. Yet the only difference was that I worked a jolly sight harder than most of them, and they little knew that at that moment I was hurrying about among them simply to take mental notes in a highly sympathetic and artistic spirit. Mine was not the only top-hat that roused their ire; in fact, they regarded this hateful but honourable head-covering as an embodiment of Capital; therefore they knocked it off whenever they saw it among them. Legally this was assault, if not battery, but they cared nothing for that, and in another and more ferocious sort of upheaval, no doubt, they would have knocked off the heads under the hats as well as the hats themselves. This, however, they did not do; in fact, the revolution, taken piecemeal, which is the only way a single pedestrian can take it, was an utter coward, for at the word “copper,” whole gangs of twenty or thirty men would evaporate, only to form again as soon as the guardians of the peace had disappeared. Such, indeed, was the celerity of the revolution when threatened with the law, that again and again the police charged thin air. Doubtless this was the result of hunger, for had the people been well fed, they would have been braver. But, of course, if they had been well fed, they would not have revolted. In fact, a revolution is a very good example of cause and effect. My top-hat was knocked off for the third time in Oxford Street, and at the same moment somebody grabbed at my watch-chain and tried to possess themselves of my “Waterbury.” In fact, the top-hat was really a source of danger, and, at the third loss, I ignored the hat, now much the worse for wear, and left it for the younger members of the revolution to play football with. I then went on bareheaded, until reaching a small shop in a back street that had not been penetrated by the mob. Here I purchased a cloth cap of dingy appearance and a brown muffler, and, thus accoutered, I plunged into the fray once more. The men in Oxford Street were armed with stones, and when a private carriage passed down the way, they broke the windows. The hansom, the harmless four-wheeler, and the groaning omnibus they did not molest; but a private carriage awoke their worst passions, and they smashed the windows, utterly regardless of the harm they might be doing to the occupant—fair or otherwise.