“And a most invaluable assistant she is, too,” cried Mr. Alden, warmly; “she selects all the short stories for the magazine, and I doubt if you could find, even in the office of the _Atlantic Monthly_, any one with such keen perceptions of what the public do not want as Susan Rondeau, the idiot reader of Franklin Square.”
At this moment a hoarse yell arose from the crowd of strikers beneath the window, and was borne to the ears of those who were gathered in the business office.
“What does that noise mean?” demanded the senior partner, an angry flush suffusing his cheek. “Do they think they can frighten me with yells and threats of violence? I will hang out these signs, and bid them do their worst!”
“Stop! I implore you, stop!” cried Henry Rondeau, as he threw himself before his chief. “The sight of those signs would madden them, and the counsel of the cooler heads, which has thus far controlled them, would be swept away in a moment. And then--the deluge!”
“But we do not fear even death,” cried the courageous publisher.
“Mr. Harper,” continued the young workman, earnestly, “at this very moment the master poet is urging them to desperate measures. He has already in his possession the address and dinner-hour of every gentleman in this room, and--”
“And,” pursued Henry Rondeau, “he has threatened to place the list in the hands of Stephen Masset!”
“Merciful heavens!” exclaimed the veteran publisher, as he sank, pale and trembling, in his easy-chair, while his associates wrung their hands in bitter despair; “can nothing be done to prevent it?”
“Yes,” cried the young working-man. “Accept the offer of the Poets’ Union to make a new sliding-scale. Make a few slight concessions to the men, and they will meet you half-way. Put emery wheels in the dialect shop instead of the old-fashioned cross-cut files and sandpaper that now take up so much of the men’s time. Let one rhyme to the quatrain be sufficient at the metrical benches, and--it is a little thing, but it counts--buy some tickets for the poets’ picnic and summer-night’s festival at Snoozer’s Grove, which takes place next Monday afternoon and evening.”
Henry Rondeau’s advice was taken, and to-day the great trip-hammer is at work in the basement of the foundry, and the poets and prose-writers are busy at their benches on the upper floors. The master poet is at work among the rest, and sometimes he chuckles as he thinks of the concessions that were wrung from the foundry-owners by the great August strike. But little does the master poet dream of the vengeance that awaits him--of the awful midnight oath taken by Joseph Harper after he had signed the treaty with his employees.