Mr. Cowes falls soothingly as a stream among the heather. He is
tall, meagre, bald; he wears a very broad black necktie, his hand
saws up and down. Mr. Cowes' tone is the quietly venomous; in a few
minutes you believe in his indignation far more than in that of Mr.
Cullen. He makes a point and pauses to observe the effect upon his
hearers. He prides himself upon his grammar, goes back to correct a
concord, emphasises eccentricities of pronunciation; for instance,
he accents 'capitalist' on the second syllable, and repeats the
words with grave challenge to all and sundry. Speaking of something
which he wishes to stigmatise as a misnomer, he exclaims: 'It's what
I call a misnomy!' And he follows the assertion with an awful
suspense of utterance. He brings his speech to a close exactly with
the end of the tenth minute, and, on sitting down, eyes his unknown
neighbour with wrathful intensity for several moments.

Who will follow? A sound comes from the very back of the room, such
a sound that every head turns in astonished search for the source of
it. Such voice has the wind in garret-chimneys on a winter night. It
is a thin wail, a prelude of lamentation; it troubles the blood. The
speaker no one seems to know; he is a man of yellow visage, with
head sunk between pointed shoulders, on his crown a mere scalp-lock.
He seems to be afflicted with a disease of the muscles; his
malformed body quivers, the hand he raises shakes paralytic. His
clothes are of the meanest; what his age may be it is impossible to
judge. As his voice gathers strength, the hearers begin to feel the
influence of a terrible earnestness. He does not rant, he does not
weigh his phrases; the stream of bitter prophecy flows on smooth and
dark. He is supplying the omission in Mutimer's harangue, is bidding
his class know itself and chasten itself, as an indispensable
preliminary to any great change in the order of things. He cries