paper--or else a curious idea or so flung out stridently over the heads
of the crowd by a man on a soap box.

I love this corner of the great city; I love the sense of the warm human
tide flowing all about me. I love to look into the strange, dark, eager,
sensitive, blunt faces.

The other noon, drifting there in that human eddy, I stopped to listen
to a small, shabby man who stood in transitory eminence upon his soap
box, half his body reaching above the knobby black soil of human heads
around him--black, knobby soil that he was seeking, there in the spring
sunshine, to plough with strange ideas. He had ruddy cheeks and a tuft
of curly hair set like an upholstery button on each side of his bald
head. The front teeth in his upper jaw were missing, and as he opened
his mouth one could see the ample lining of red flannel.

He raised his voice penetratingly to overcome the noise of the world,
straining until the dark-corded veins of his throat stood out sharply
and perspiration gleamed on his bald forehead. As though his life
depended upon the delivery of his great message he was explaining to
that close-packed crowd that there was no God.

From time to time he offered for sale pamphlets by R.G. Ingersoll and
Frederic Harrison, with grimy back numbers of a journal called the
"Truth-Seeker."

By the slant and timbre of his speech he was an Englishman; he had a
gift of vigorous statement, and met questioners like an intellectual
pugilist with skilful blows between the eyes: and his grammar was bad.