especially after whisky--lectured to him
against superstition and missionaries. Azuma-zi, however, shirked
the discussion of his gods, even though he was kicked for it.

Azuma-zi had come, clad in white but insufficient raiment,
out of the stokehole of the _Lord Clive_, from the Straits
Settlements, and beyond, into London. He had heard even in his
youth of the greatness and riches of London, where all the women
are white and fair, and even the beggars in the streets are white,
and he arrived, with newly earned gold coins in his pocket, to
worship at the shrine of civilisation. The day of his landing was
a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a wind-worried drizzle filtered
down to the greasy streets, but he plunged boldly into the delights
of Shadwell, and was presently cast up, shattered in health,
civilised in costume, penniless and, except in matters of the
direst necessity, practically a dumb animal, to toil for James
Holroyd and to be bullied by him in the dynamo shed at Camberwell.
And to James Holroyd bullying was a labour of love.

There were three dynamos with their engines at Camberwell.
The two that had been there since the beginning were 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