ty than sheep being sheared, but when the contents of
one--any one at random--are put into your hand, something human and
distinctive is put into your hand. I read the caligraphy on a blue sheet
of paper, and it was written by a woman in Wyoming, a neat, earnest,
harassed, and possibly rather harassing woman, and she wanted all sorts
of things and wanted them intensely--I could see that with clearness.
This complex purchase was an important event in her year. So far as her
imagination went, only one mail-order would reach the Chicago house that
morning, and the entire establishment would be strained to meet it.

Then the blue sheet was taken from me and thrust into the system, and
therein lost to me. I was taken to a mysteriously rumbling shaft of
broad diameter, that pierced all the floors of the house and had
trap-doors on each floor. And when one of the trap-doors was opened I
saw packages of all descriptions racing after one another down spiral
planes within the shaft. There were several of these great shafts--with
divisions for mail, express, and freight traffic--and packages were
ceaselessly racing down all of them, laden with the objects desired by
the woman of Wyoming and her fifty-nine-thousand-odd fellow-customers of
the day. At first it seemed to me impossible that that earnest,
impatient woman in Wyoming should get precisely what she wanted; it
seemed to me impossible that some mistake should not occur in all that
noisy fever of rushing activity. But after I had followed an order, and
seen it filled and checked, my opinion was that a mistake would be the
most miraculous phenomenon in that establishment. I felt quite reassured
on behalf of Wyoming.

And then I was suddenly in a room where six hundred billing-machines
were being clicked at once by six hundred young women, a fantastic aural
nightmare, though none of the young women appeared to be conscious that
anything bizarre was going on.... And then I was in a printing-shop,
where several lightning machines spent their whole time every day in
printing the most popular work of reference in the United States, a
bulky book full of pictures, with an annual circulation of five and a
half million copies--the general catalogue of the firm. For the first
time I realized the true meaning of the word "popularity "--and
sighed....

And then it was lunch-time for about a couple of thousand employees,
and in the boundless restaurant I witnessed the working of the devi