Here is his career: a successful lawyer and leader in society; a member of the Legislature; a United States Senator, and then if he cares for it—well, well, well!
But in the meantime, there he sits, not with his feet in the window or on a chair—he is a gentleman, I said, a Boston gentleman—the flower of a gracile ancestry. In the lazy, hazy air is the hum of autumn birds and beetles—the hectic beauty of the dying year is over all. The hum seems to grow—it becomes a subdued roar.
You have sat behind the scenes waiting for the curtain to rise—a thousand people are there just out of your sight—five hundred of them are talking. It is one high-keyed, humming roar.
The roar of a mob is keyed lower—it is guttural and approaches a growl—it seems to come in waves, a brazen roar rising and falling—but a roar, full of menace, hate, deaf to reason, dead to appeal.
You have heard the roar of the mob in "Julius Cæsar," and stay! once I heard the genuine article. It was in Eighty-four—goodness gracious, I am surely getting old!—it was in a town out West. I saw nothing but a pushing, crowding mass of men, and all I heard was that deep guttural roar of the beast. I could not make out what it was all about until I saw a man climbing a telegraph-pole.
He was carrying a rope in one hand. As he climbed higher, the roar subsided. The climber reached the arms that form the cross. He swung the rope over the crossbeam and paid it out until the end was clutched by the uplifted hands of those below.
The roar arose again like an angry sea, and I saw the figure of a human being leap twenty feet into the air and swing and swirl at the end of the rope.
The roar ceased.
The lawyer laid down the brand-new book, bound in sheep, and leaned out of the window—men were running down the thoroughfare, some hatless, and at Washington Street could be seen a black mass of human beings—beings who had forsaken their reason and merged their personality into a mob.
The young lawyer arose, put on his hat, locked his office, followed down the street. His tall and muscular form pushed its way through the mass.