Two night watchmen met in front of one of the biggest office buildings in New York, within hearing of the bells of Trinity and almost within sound of the sobbing waters of the Bay. Their faces, rendered almost invisible behind the great collars that protected them from the shrill winds coming up the canyons from the sea, were tense and drawn and white, but their eyes glittered brightly, fiercely, in the darkness. They too had been waiting. In a dingy apartment in Harlem, three shifty-eyed, nervous men, and a pallid, tired, frightened woman rose suddenly from the lethargy of suspense and grinned evilly, not at each other but at the rattling, dilapidated window looking westward across the sagging roofs of the squalid district. One of the men stretched forth a quivering hand and, with a hoarse laugh of exultation, seized in his fingers a strange, crudely shaped metallic object that stood on the table nearby. He lifted it to his lips and kissed it! Then he put it down, carefully, gingerly,--with something like fear in his eyes. Scraps of tin, pieces of iron and steel, strands of wire, wads of cotton and waste, and an odd assortment of tools littered the table. Harmless appearing cans, and bottles, and dirty packages, with a mortar and pestle, a small chemist's scales, funnels and graduates stood in innocent array along a shelf attached to the wall, guarded,--so it seemed,--by sinister looking tubes and retorts. The woman, her eyes gleaming with a malevolent joy that contrasted strangely with the dread that had been in them a moment before, lifted her clenched hands and hissed out a single word: “Christ!” They, too, had been waiting. Thousands there were in the great city whose eyes glistened that night,--thousands who had not been waiting, for they knew nothing of the secret that lay secure and safe in the breasts of the few who were allowed to strike. Thousands who rejoiced, for they knew that a great and glorious deed had been done! They only knew that devastation had fallen somewhere with appalling force,--it mattered not to them where, so long as it had fallen in its appointed place! Many a glass, many a stein, was raised in stealthy tribute to the hand that had rocked the city of New York! And in the darkness of the night they hid their gloating faces, and whispered a song without melody. Rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief! In spirit, at least, they touched hands and thrilled with a common exaltation!