it presented a spectacle of increasing ruin. Tie Huge black partition opposite was swaying and threatened to topple over, with the house behind it. Above a seething mass of people, in the ghostly light of sulphur-yellow and blue, the carriage horses reared and dashed away. Happy were the unprivileged crowd outside who had decamped. The cultivated and possessing classes, on the other hand, were in such a position that they could feel the fragments of the ruin falling about their heads, and fire from heaven. It was hardly surprising that their behaviour was governed accordingly and many ladies were hurled back from the exit in the most ungentlemanly fashion, and simply rolled over one another. The officers, relying upon their bravery alone, made use of their weapons of offence against every one who opposed them, while flags, torn by the storm from what remained of the stands and the official marquee, whistled through the air, black-white-and-red, about the ears of the stragglers. Hopeless though everything was, the regimental band continued to play the national anthem, even after the military cordon and the world order had been dispersed. They played like the orchestra on a sinking ship to ward off terror and the inevitable end. Another burst of the hurricane demoralised even them. Diederich closed his eyes, and to his dazed senses the end of every thing seemed imminent. He sank back into the cool depths below the desk, to which he clung like a drowning man to a log. His farewell glance had embraced something that passed all understanding: the fence hung with black-white-and-red, which enclosed the park, had collapsed beneath the weight of the people on it, followed by this clambering up and down, this rolling about, this ebb and fall of people, standing on their heads and getting in one another's way—and then being lashed by whips from above, these streams of fire, this breaking up like the end of a drunken masquerade: nobles and commoners, the most distinguished uniform and the citizen aroused from his slumbers^ pillars of the state and heaven-sent
