And the chauffeurs near her laughed in sympathy. And gray heads stuck out of limousine windows, and millionaires and their female stood up in their snail-moving touring-cars, and top-hatted coachmen turned impassive heads on neck-hinges long since rusted with the arrogance of menials. And upon their faces and along the ranks that lined both sides of the great avenue a slow grin spread--uncertain, hesitating, dubious! The great American sense of humor was trying to assert itself. Hendrik's joke was not labeled "Joke" plainly enough. Otherwise the spectators would have shown much earlier their ability to laugh at death, hunger, disease, misery, drunkenness, honesty, despair--anything, so long as it was the death, hunger, disease, misery, drunkenness, honesty, and despair of others. But at Tiffany's corner the traffic policeman stopped the leader of the band; and he stopped the band; and the band stopped Rutgers; and Rutgers stopped his army; and that stopped all traffic on the Avenue up to Forty-second Street. Hendrik Rutgers hurried forward and explained, calmly: "Here, officer. I am the secretary of the National Street Advertising Men's Association. We have a permit from the Mayor. Here it is." "Oh, advertising! I see!" said the policeman, and smiled appreciatively. He had feared they might be starving men. "Yes," said H. Rutgers, quite loudly, "advertising the fact that a man out of a job in New York, who is too proud to beg and too honest to steal, has to become a sandwich-man and make from twenty-five to forty-five cents for ten hours work--not in China or Mexico, but in New York, to-day; men who are willing to work, but are old or sickly or have no regular trade. You know how the Mayor feels about the rights of citizens who are not rich and the duty of paid officials of this city. He and I are opposed to too much law in the way of clubs. So kindly pass the word down the line, officer." The big traffic policeman, far more impressed by the delivery than by the speech itself, touched his hand to his cap so very respectfully that the grinning crowd at once became serious. Each woman turned on her neighbor and frowned furiously the unuttered scolding for the other's unseemly levity. "What does it mean?" asked hundreds. All looked toward Hendrik Rutgers for explanation, for official permission to laugh at a spectacle that was not without humorous suggestions. But he kept them guessing. This is called knowledge of stage effects; also psychological insight; also cheap politics. Historians even refer to it as statesmanship.