tin, containing an infernal machine, under his arm, his angelic
countenance radiant in the sunshine, came down the steps from the dining-
room window. And, while Dominic ran to greet him, the cat crept back
again--its face was the face of Sir Abel Barking, and it made a spring at
the sparrows. But the pillar broke and the basin toppled over, pinning
it, across the loins, down on to the clinkers under the edge of the stone
lip.

"Oh! you've spoilt my garden, you've spoilt my garden!" Dominic cried.
"The basin has fallen. The sparrows will never wash in it any more."

But Pascal Pelletier patted him on the head tenderly.

"Do not weep over the fallen basin, very dear one," he said. "Rather sing
aloud Te Deum in praise of the glorious goddess of Social Revolution who
has delivered the enemy of the people into our hands. This is no affair
of cat and bird, but of the capitalist and the proletariat on which he
battens. So for a little space let the unholy creature lie there
writhing. Let it understand what it is to have a back broken by the
weight of an impossible burden. Let it try vainly to drag its limbs from
beneath an immovable load. Observe it, let it suffer. Very soon we will
finish with it, and explode the iniquitous system it represents. See, in
the name of humanity, of labour, of the unknown and unnumbered millions
of the martyred poor, I set a match to this good little fuse, and, with
the rapidity of thought, blow blasphemous tyrant Capital into a thousand
fragments of reeking flesh and splintered bone!"

But to the little boy, words and spectacle alike had become unendurably
painful.