WALL DECORATIONS.
The walls of the room are almost totally covered with pictures, portraits, newspaper headings, etc. In crazy-quilt fashion is arranged Lieske, Shakspere, Hoedel, Rousseau, Karl Marx, Feurbach, Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, Richard Wagner, Marat, Hans Sachs, St. Simon, Lassalle, Proudhon, Anton Kammerer, Stallmacher, the Irish patriots, Brady, Kelly, Curley, Tynan, Wilson, Gallagher, and Normann, a life-size picture of Louise Michel, an excellent photograph of prince Krapotkine, pictures from Puck, Punch, Fleigende Blatter, sketches from George Eber’s “Egypt”—a queer collection indeed.
Herr Most takes especial pride in a gibbet traced in red lines on the whitewashed wall and bearing portraits of the following persons: The emperors of Germany, Russia, and Austria, Queen Victoria, President Grevey, King Humbert, King Christian of Denmark and his premier, Estrup; the Shah of Persha; the Sultan, the Emperors of China, Japan, and Brazil, and President Cleveland. As an illustration of the bitter feeling prevailing between the anarchists and socialists was a caricature of Alexander Jonas, the socialist politician, playing a flute to the inspiring tune, “Wait Till the Clouds Roll By.”
The German Chancellor, Prince Bismarck, is caricatured a dozen different ways, and blood-thirsty sentiments are written beneath the pictures. A large picture presents the famous Rus-conspirators against Alexander II.; another recalls the trial of Reinsdorf and comrades, charged with high treason; then follow some scenes from the Paris commune in 1871, and next to these sanguinary sketches an elegant fan is suspended, unconscious of its strange surroundings. Anarchistic papers from every quarter of the world are pasted from ceiling to floor, and we learn the existence of obscure journals like Ni Dieu, Ni Maitre, Fackel, Le Cri du Peuple, Alarm, Lucifer, Revolte, La Question Sociale, the Roumelian periodical Revista Sociale, Il Fascio Operairo, Der Arme Teufel, and Proletaren. Italians who stray into this nest have an opportunity of studying a “Programma Socialista, Anarchico, Revoluzionario del Giuppo Italiano.”
Perhaps the master of this queer den will soon view the world once more through prison bars.
COMYNS RAY.
CHAPTER XVI.
Biography of Herr Most. His past career and early training. His imprisonment in the BastileBastille and Red Tower for preaching his gospel of blood. Extracts from his inflammatory utterances. Whet your daggers. Let every prince find a Brutus by his throne.
THE PAST CAREER OF HERR MOST.
That practice has now become obsolete of predicting the future of a child by consulting the aspect of the planet under which it was born at the day and hour of birth. At the advent of Herr Most upon this mundane sphere, who, looking through the horroscope of his future, but could in the interests of humanity, have wished that the feeble spark of life in the frail tenimenttenement might have become extinguished, or that it had never existed.