Wilhelm's first impression was not favorable. He had bought a pamphlet at the door, and in it he read foolish jokes, clumsy tirades against capitalists, and drearily silly verses. If the party possessed quick and cultivated writers, they had certainly not been employed on this leaflet. His finer senses were as shocked at the meeting as his taste was at the pamphlet. Mingled odors of tobacco-smoke, beer, human breath, and damp clothes filled the air; the people at the tables had an indescribably common stamp, unlovely manners, harsh, loud voices, and unattractive faces. They gossiped and laughed noisily, and coarse expressions were frequent. The earnest moral tone, the almost gloomy melancholy which Wilhelm had found so attractive in socialistic writings, was absent, and it seemed to him as if the new doctrine in its removal from the enthusiast's study to the beer-tables of the crowd had lost all nobility, and had sunk to degradation. Paul took no trouble to conceal the disgust which "this dirty rabble" gave him. He gazed contemptuously about him, and every time that one of his neighbors' elbows came near his coat he brushed the place angrily, and muttered half-aloud: "Well, if I were the government I would jolly soon stop your meetings." Dr. Schrotter, on the other hand, found the sight of the crowd rekindle in him all the feeling of sentiment he had had for the old democrats; he felt his heart overflow with pity and tenderness. With his physician's eyes he pierced through the brutal physiognomies, and observed them with kindness and sympathy, making his friends attentive too. "One of the martyrs of work," he said gently, indicating a haggard man sitting at the next table who had lost one eye. "How do you know that?" "He must be a worker in metal, and has had a splinter in one of his eyes. He had the injured eye removed to save the other." Here was a baker with pale face and inflamed eyelids, coughing badly--consumptive, in consequence of the dust from the flour--his eyes affected by the heat of the oven. Here was a man who had lost a finger of his left hand--the victim of a cloth loom; and here a pallid-looking man, showing when he spoke or laughed slate-colored gums--a case of lead-poisoning, with a painful death as the inevitable result. And it seemed as if over all these cripples and sickly people the Genius of Work hovered as the black angel of Eastern stories, tracing on their foreheads with his brush--on this one mutilation, on this one an early death. Schrotter's observations and explanations placed the whole meeting in a different light to Wilhelm. The coarseness of the men, even the dirt on their hands and faces, touched him like a reproach, and in their jokes and laughter he seemed to hear a bitter cry.