e possible we would have the noises of that shed always about the
reader as he reads, we would tell all our story to such an accompaniment.
It was a steady stream of din, from which the ear picked out first one
thread and then another; there was the intermittent snorting, panting, and
seething of the steam engines, the suck and thud of their pistons, the
dull beat on the air as the spokes of the great driving wheels came round,
a note the leather straps made as they ran tighter and looser, and a
fretful tumult from the dynamos; and, over all, sometimes inaudible, as
the ear tired of it, and then creeping back upon the senses again, was
this trombone note of the big machine. The floor never felt steady and
quiet beneath one's feet, but quivered and jarred. It was a confusing,
unsteady place, and enough to send anyone's thoughts jerking into odd
zigzags. And for three months, while the big strike of the engineers was
in progress, Holroyd, who was a blackleg, and Azuma-zi, who was a mere
black, were never out of the stir and eddy of it, but slept and fed in the
little wooden shanty between the shed and the gates.

Holroyd delivered a theological lecture on the text of his big machine
soon after Azuma-zi came. He had to shout to be heard in the din. "Look at
that," said Holroyd; "where's your 'eathen idol to match 'im?" And
Azuma-zi looked. For a moment Holroyd was inaudible, and then Azuma-zi
heard: "Kill a hundred men. Twelve per cent, on the ordinary shares," said
Holroyd, "and that's something like a Gord."

Holroyd was proud of his big dynamo, and expatiated upon its size and
power to Azuma-zi until heaven knows what odd currents of thought that and
the incessant whirling and shindy set up within the curly black cranium.
He would explain in the most graphic manner the dozen or so ways in which
a man might be killed by it, and once he gave Azuma-zi a shock as a sample
of its quality. After that, in the breathing-times of his labour--it was
heavy labour, being not only his own, but most of Holroyd's--Azuma-zi
would sit and watch the big machine. Now and then the brushes would
sparkle and spit blue flashes, at which Holroyd would swear, but all the
rest was as smooth and rhythmic as breathing. The band ran shouting over
the shaft, and ever behind one as one watched was the complacent thud of
the piston. So it lived all day in this big airy shed, with him and
Holroyd to wait upon it; not prisoned up and slaving to drive a s