There were three dynamos with their engines at Camberwell.  The two that have been there since the beginning are small machines; the larger one was new.  The smaller machines made a reasonable noise; their straps hummed over the drums, every now and then the brushes buzzed and fizzled, and the air churned steadily, whoo! whoo! whoo! between their poles.  One was loose in its foundations and kept the shed vibrating.  But the big dynamo drowned these little noises altogether with the sustained drone of its iron core, which somehow set part of the ironwork humming.  The place made the visitor’s head reel with the throb, throb, throb of the engines, the rotation of the big wheels, the spinning ball-valves, the occasional spittings of the steam, and over all the deep, unceasing, surging note of the big dynamo.  This last noise was from an engineering point of view a defect, but Azuma-zi accounted it unto the monster for mightiness and pride.

If it were 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