The meeting, squeezed in between the coffee house chats and dinner time, has been called by Michael the Third’s best chums among the older men:—Boone, and the Rabbi, who hope to defeat the new measure. The speakers maintain that, once these laborers are admitted inside our double Gothic walls, it will be impossible to expel them, even after the Street of Past History is finished. They prove that there are enough bricklaying machines to fill all the present contracts on time. They maintain that there are endless boys in the High School Labor Department trained to follow up and finish the work in the wake of such machines as may surely be impressed into service. All this while that solemn conceited pumpkin Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, thinks he is brooding like Prince Hamlet himself. He will not say how much he believes of these accusations hurled about. Now rises old Black Hawk Boone and I am indeed amazed to see him through Singaporian eyes. He looks almost like a whey-faced creature, he is so much whiter than my master. And he looks like the world’s greatest fidget, my master is such a languorous cat. And for all Boone’s shrewd, cinnamon bear countenance, he seems to me a simple baby, my master looks so wise. And when he speaks of my master by implication, I cannot but be insulted. For my body and nerves tonight are Malay, whatever my soul may be. And at the same time I am in a terrible fear of Boone as one would be of a child with lighted matches in a powder mill. There is in him a certain divination by force of fury that I cannot but shrink to apprehend, though I utterly despise his mind, as long as I wear this Malay body as a garment and make shift with these Malay eyes and ears and this Malay sixth sense. Boone’s fury is everything. His words are nothing. In his capacity as editor and citizen, and not as President of the Board of Education, he denounces my master, who is entitled to official courtesy as a member of the University faculty. But it is plainly in Boone’s thought that the time has almost come for the parting with the course in Malay Arts and Letters and Allied Studies, and the dismissal of all oracles therein, though they be the most learned oracles in the whole world, and the most courteous creatures above ground. Boone snaps out his words like a beast straining at a chain.