It was Sunday evening, and on Sundays Max Schurz, the chief of the
London Socialists, always held his weekly receptions. That night
his cosmopolitan refugee friends were all at liberty; his French
disciples could pour in from the little lanes and courts in Soho,
where, since the Commune, they had plied their peaceful trades as
engravers, picture-framers, artists'-colourmen, models, pointers,
and so forth--for most of them were hangers-on in one way or another
of the artistic world; his German adherents could stroll round,
pipe in mouth, from their printing-houses, their ham-and-beef shops,
or their naturalists' chambers, where they stuffed birds or set up
exotic butterflies in little cabinets--for most of them were more
or less literary or scientific in their pursuits; and his few English
sympathisers, chiefly dissatisfied philosophical Radicals of the
upper classes, could drop in casually for a chat and a smoke, on
their way home from the churches to which they had been dutifully
escorting their un-emancipated wives and sisters. Max Schurz kept
open house for all on Sunday evenings, and there was not a drawing-room
in London better filled than his with the very advanced and not
undistinguished set who alone had the much-prized entree of his
exclusive salon.

The salon itself did not form any component part of Max Schurz's
own private residence in any way. The great Socialist, the man whose
mandates shook the thrones of Russia and Austria, whose movements
spread terror in Paris and Berlin, whose dictates were even obeyed
in Kerry and in Chicago, occupied for his own use two small rooms
at the top of a shabby composite tenement in a doubtful district
of Marylebone. The little parlour where he carried on his trade of
a microscope-lens grinder would not have sufficed to hold one-tenth
of the eager half-washed crowd that pressed itself enthusiastically