wo days, I will make one myself."

"Very wonderful, indeed," said Douglas, politely, looking askance at
him.

"No more wonderful than the flight of a sparrow, I assure you. We shall
presently be conveyed to the top of this building by my motor. Here you
have a model locomotive, a model steam hammer, and a sewing machine: all
of which, as you see, I can set to work. However, this is mere show. You
must always bear in mind that the novelty is not in the working of these
machines, but the smallness of the cost of working."

Douglas endured the rest of the exhibition in silence, understanding
none of the contrivances until they were explained, and not always
understanding them even then. It was disagreeable to be instructed by
Conolly--to feel that there were matters of which Conolly knew
everything and he nothing. If he could have but shaped a pertinent
question or two, enough to prove that he was quite capable of the
subject if he chose to turn his attention to it, he could have accepted
Conolly's information on the machinery as indifferently as that of a
policeman on the shortest way to some place that it was no part of a
gentleman's routine to frequent. As it was, he took refuge in his
habitual reserve, and, lest the exhibition should be prolonged on his
account, took care to shew no more interest in it than was barely
necessary to satisfy Mr. Lind. At last it was over; and they returned
westward together in a hansom.

"He is a Yankee, I suppose,'" said Douglas, as if ingenuity were a low
habit that must be tolerated in an American.

"Yes. They are a wonderful people for that sort of thing. Curious turn
of mind the mechanical instinct is!"

"It is one with which I have no sympathy. It is generally subject to the
delusion that it has a monopoly of utility. Your mechanic hates art;
pelts it with lumps of iron; and strives to extinguish it beneath all
the hard and ugly facts of existence. On the other hand, your artist
instinctively hates machinery. I fear I am an artist."

"I dont think you are quite right there, Sholto. No. Look at the steam
engine, the electric telegraph, the--the other inventions of the
century. How could we get on without them?"

"Quite as well as Athens got on without them. Our mechanical
contrivances seem to serve us; but they are really mastering us,
crowding and crushing the beauty out of our lives, and making commerce
the only god."

"I certainly admit that the coarser forms of Radical