“Well, now that’s a pity,” whispered Endicott. “I guess we better go before they slip in any dry old substitutes. I’ve been seen here, that’s enough.”
But Starr laid a detaining hand on her father’s arm.
“Wait a little, Daddy,” she said softly.
“But he has sent a substitute,” went on the chairman, “a man whom he says is a hundred per cent. better able to talk on the subject than himself. He spoke to me from the station ’phone just before he left and told me that he felt that you would all agree he had done well to go when you had heard the man whom he has sent in his place. I have the pleasure to introduce to you Mr. Michael Endicott who will speak to you this evening on the “Needs of the Tenement Dwellers”—Mr. Endicott.”
Amid the silence that ensued after the feebly-polite applause Michael rose. For just an instant he stood, looking over the audience and a strange subtle thrill ran over the vast assemblage.
Then Michael, insensibly measuring the spacious hall, flung his clear, beautiful voice out into it, and reached the uttermost bounds of the room.
“Did you know that there are in this city now seventy-one thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven totally dark rooms; some of them connected with an air-shaft twenty-eight inches wide and seventy feet deep; many of them absolutely without access to even a dark shaft; and that these rooms are the only place in the whole wide, beautiful world for thousands of little children, unless they stay in the street?”
The sentence shot through the audience like a great deliberate bolt of lightning that crashed through the hearts of the hearers and tore away every vestige of their complacency. The people sat up and took notice. Starr thrilled and trembled, she knew not why.
“There is a tenement with rooms like this, a ‘dumb-bell’ tenement, it is called, in the alley where, for aught I know, I was born—”
“Oh!” The sound swept over the listeners in a great wave like a sob of protest. Men and women raised their opera glasses and looked at the speaker again. They asked one another: “Who is he?” and settled quiet to hear what more he had to say.