windows" on their first floors,
seeming to mean it for a joke; one or two with unaltered facades peeped
humorously over the tops of temporary office buildings of one story
erected in the old front yards. Altogether, the town here was like a
boarding-house hash the Sunday after Thanksgiving; the old ingredients
were discernible.

This was the fringe of Bigness's own sanctuary, and now Bibbs reached
the roaring holy of holies itself. The car must stop at every crossing
while the dark-garbed crowds, enveloped in maelstroms of dust, hurried
before it. Magnificent new buildings, already dingy, loomed hundreds of
feet above him; newer ones, more magnificent, were rising beside them,
rising higher; old buildings were coming down; middle-aged buildings
were coming down; the streets were laid open to their entrails and men
worked underground between palisades, and overhead in metal cobwebs
like spiders in the sky. Trolley-cars and long interurban cars, built to
split the wind like torpedo-boats, clanged and shrieked their way
round swarming corners; motor-cars of every kind and shape known to
man babbled frightful warnings and frantic demands; hospital ambulances
clamored wildly for passage; steam-whistles signaled the swinging of
titanic tentacle and claw; riveters rattled like machine-guns; the
ground shook to the thunder of gigantic trucks; and the conglomerate
sound of it all was the sound of earthquake playing accompaniments for
battle and sudden death. On one of the new steel buildings no work
was being done that afternoon. The building had killed a man in the
morning--and the steel-workers always stop for the day when that
"happens."

And in the hurrying crowds, swirling and sifting through the
brobdingnagian camp of iron and steel, one saw the camp-followers and
the pagan women--there would be work to-day and dancing to-night. For
the Puritan's dry voice is but the crackling of a leaf underfoot in the
rush and roar of the coming of the new Egypt.

Bibbs was on time. He knew it must be "to the minute" or his father
would consider it an outrage; and the big chronometer in Sheridan's
office marked four precisely when Bibbs walked in. Coincidentally with
his entrance five people who had been at work in the office, under
Sheridan's direction, walked out. They departed upon no visible or
audible suggestion, and with a promptness that seemed ominous to
the new-comer. As the massive door clicked softly behind the elderly
ste