monkeys up sticks, which when completed they proceeded to sell in the
streets. In another corner two Italians settled down to manufacture a
remarkable new kind of artificial flower with which they traded when
opportunity permitted. Small plaster-casts of Queen Victoria and Marat
were also manufactured here. When the influx of starving Italians
necessitated it, a kind of soup-kitchen was inaugurated over which Beppe
presided, and very busy he was kept too, manufacturing _minestras_
and _polenta_, a welcome innovation to me, I may mention, after a
long regime of small and nauseous tarts, bread and jam, and cheese. In
short, the headquarters of the _Tocsin_, besides being a printing and
publishing office, rapidly became a factory, a debating club, a school, a
hospital, a mad-house, a soup-kitchen and a sort of Rowton House, all in
one.

When I look back on the scene now, and recall all the noise and hubbub,
the singing, the discussions and disputes, the readings, the hammerings on
this side, the hangings on that, the feeding, and M'Dermott's
Shakespearian recitations, I find it very difficult to realise the amount
of hard work which I and the other few serious and earnest comrades got
through.

The chief impediment to the progress of the work, however, was Short, the
compositor. On close acquaintance with this creature, I found that he did
not belie my first impression of him as the laziest and most slovenly of
men; and I soon realised the two dominant characteristics which had made
of him a Socialist--envy and sloth. So deeply was he imbued with envy that
he was quite unable to rest so long as anyone else was better off than
himself; and although he did not care one jot for "humanity" of which he
prated so freely, and was incapable of regenerating a flea, he found in a
certain section of the Socialist and Anarchist party that degree of