g and
arising a vast and fearful breathing, as of some immense prehistoric
monster in pain. At first he thought he was asleep and dreaming. But he
was not. This gigantic sighing continued regularly, and Mr Cowlishaw had
never heard anything like it before. It banished sleep.

After about two hours of its awful uncanniness, Mr Cowlishaw caught the
sound of creeping footsteps in the corridor and fumbling noises. He got
up again. He was determined, though he should have to interrogate
burglars and assassins, to discover the meaning of that horrible
sighing. He courageously pulled his door open, and saw an aproned man
with a candle marking boots with chalk, and putting them into a box.

"I say!" said Mr Cowlishaw.

"Beg yer pardon, sir," the man whispered. "I'm getting forward with my
work so as I can go to th' fut-baw match this afternoon. I hope I didn't
wake ye, sir."

"Look here!" said Mr Cowlishaw. "What's that appalling noise that's
going on all the time?"

"Noise, sir?" whispered the man, astonished.

"Yes," Mr Cowlishaw insisted. "Like something breathing. Can't you hear
it?"

The man cocked his ears attentively. The noise veritably boomed in Mr
Cowlishaw's ears.

"Oh! _That_!" said the man at length. "That's th' blast furnaces at
Cauldon Bar Ironworks. Never heard that afore, sir? Why, it's like that
every night. Now you mention it, I _do_ hear it! It's a good couple o'
miles off, though, that is!"

Mr Cowlishaw closed his door.

At five o'clock, when he had nearly, but not quite, forgotten the
sighing, his lifelong friend, the oval-wheeled electric car, bumped and
quaked through the street, and the ewer and basin chattered together
busily, and the seismic phenomena definitely recommenced. The night was
still black, but the industrial day had dawned in the Five Towns. Long
series of carts without springs began to jolt past under the window of
Mr Cowlishaw, and then there was a regular multitudinous clacking of
clogs and boots on the pavement. A little later the air was rent by
first one steam-whistle, and then another, and then another, in divers
tones announcing that it was six o'clock, or five minutes past, or
half-past, or anything. The periodicity of earthquakes had by this time
quickened to five minutes, as at midnight. A motor-car emerged under
the archway of the hotel, and remained stationary outside with its
engine racing. And amid the earthquakes, the motor-car, the carts, the
clogs and boots