the worlds.  I went from workshop to workshop, and examined all that was being done, and understood,—­for I had known a little upon the earth, and my old knowledge came back, and to learn so much more filled me with new life.  The master of all was one who never rested, nor seemed to feel weariness nor pain nor pleasure.  He had everything in his hand.  All who were there were his workmen or his assistants or his servants.  No one shared with him in his councils.  He was more than a prince among them; he was as a god.  And the things he planned and made, and at which in armies and legions his workmen toiled and labored, were like living things.  They were made of steel and iron, but they moved like the brains and nerves of men.  They went where he directed them, and did what he commanded, and moved at a touch.  And though he talked little, when he saw how I followed all that he did, he was a little moved towards me, and spoke and explained to me the conceptions that were in his mind, one rising out of another, like the leaf out of the stem and the flower out of the bud.  For nothing pleased him that he did, and necessity was upon him to go on and on.

‘They are like living things,’ I said; ’they do your bidding, whatever you command them.  They are like another and a stronger race of men.’

‘Men!’ he said, ’what are men?  The most contemptible of all things that are made,—­creatures who will undo in a moment what it has taken millions of years, and all the skill and all the strength of generations to do.  These are better than men.  They cannot think or feel.  They cannot stop but at my bidding, or begin unless I will.  Had men been made so, we should be masters of the world.’

’Had men been made so, you would never have been,—­for what could genius have done or thought?—­you would have been a machine like all the rest.’

‘And better so!’ he said, and turned away; for at that moment, watching keenly as he spoke the action of a delicate combination of movements, all made and balanced to a hair’s breadth, there had come to him suddenly the idea of something which made it a hundredfold more strong and terrible.  For they were terrible, these things that lived yet did not live, which were his slaves and moved at his will.  When he had done this, he looked at me, and a smile came upon his mouth; but his eyes smiled not, nor ever changed from the set look they wore.  And the words he spoke were familiar words, not his, but out of the old life.  ‘What a piece of work is a man!’ he said; ’how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable!  And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?’ His mind had followed another strain of thought, which to me was bewildering, so that I did not know how to reply.  I answered like a child, upon his last word.