by Harold Frederic
PART I
CHAPTER I
No such throng had ever before been seen in the building
during all its eight years of existence. People were
wedged together most uncomfortably upon the seats;
they stood packed in the aisles and overflowed the galleries;
at the back, in the shadows underneath these galleries,
they formed broad, dense masses about the doors,
through which it would be hopeless to attempt a passage.
The light, given out from numerous tin-lined circles
of flaring gas-jets arranged on the ceiling,
fell full upon a thousand uplifted faces--some framed
in bonnets or juvenile curls, others bearded or crowned
with shining baldness--but all alike under the spell
of a dominant emotion which held features in abstracted
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