agged man, with a dreadful cough. He left
no message. That was the finish of him so far as my story goes.
I wonder sometimes what has become of him. Was he an ingenious
monomaniac, or a fraudulent dealer in pebbles, or has he really
made diamonds as he asserted? The latter is just sufficiently
credible to make me think at times that I have missed the most
brilliant opportunity of my life. He may of course be dead, and
his diamonds carelessly thrown aside--one, I repeat, was almost as
big as my thumb. Or he may be still wandering about trying to sell
the things. It is just possible he may yet emerge upon society,
and, passing athwart my heavens in the serene altitude sacred to
the wealthy and the well-advertised, reproach me silently for my
want of enterprise. I sometimes think I might at least have risked
five pounds.

THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS

The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at
Camberwell, and kept the electric railway going, came out of
Yorkshire, and his name was James Holroyd. He was a practical
electrician, but fond of whisky, a heavy red-haired brute with
irregular teeth. He doubted the existence of the deity, but
accepted Carnot's cycle, and he had read Shakespeare and found him
weak in chemistry. His helper came out of the mysterious East, and
his name was Azuma-zi. But Holroyd called him Pooh-bah. Holroyd
liked a nigger because he would stand kicking--a habit with
Holroyd--and did not pry into the machinery and try to learn the
ways of it. Certain odd possibilities of the negro mind brought
into abrupt contact with the crown of our civilisation Holroyd
never fully realised, though just at the end he got some inkling of
them.

To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps,
more negroid than anything else, though his hair was curly rather
than frizzy, and his nose had a bridge. Moreover, his skin was
brown rather than black, and the whites of his eyes were yellow.
His broad cheekbones and narrow chin gave his face something of the
viperine V. His head, too, was broad behind, and low and narrow at
the forehead, as if his brain had been twisted round in the reverse
way to a European's. He was short of stature and still shorter of
English. In conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known
marketable value, and his infrequent words were carved and wrought
into heraldic grotesqueness. Holroyd tried to elucidate his
religious beliefs, and--