nothing
less than a telephone of such stentorian efficiency that it bellowed
your most private communications all over the house instead of
whispering them with some sort of discretion. This was not what the
British stockbroker wanted; so the company was soon merged in the
National Telephone Company, after making a place for itself in the
history of literature, quite unintentionally, by providing me with a
job. Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted, it crowded the basement
of a huge pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American
artificers. These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the
skilled proletariat of the United States. They sang obsolete sentimental
songs with genuine emotion; and their language was frightful even to an
Irishman. They worked with a ferocious energy which was out of all
proportion to the actual result achieved. Indomitably resolved to assert
their republican manhood by taking no orders from a tall-hatted
Englishman whose stiff politeness covered his conviction that they were,
relatively to himself, inferior and common persons, they insisted on
being slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a genuine free and
equal American foreman. They utterly despised the artfully slow British
workman who did as little for his wages as he possibly could; never
hurried himself; and had a deep reverence for anyone whose pocket could
be tapped by respectful behavior. Need I add that they were
contemptuously wondered at by this same British workman as a parcel of
outlandish adult boys, who sweated themselves for their employer's
benefit instead of looking after their own interests? They adored Mr.
Edison as the greatest man of all time in every possible department of
science, art and philosophy, and execrated Mr. Graham Bell, the inventor
of the rival telephone, as his Satanic adversary; but each of them had
(or pretended to have) on the brink of completion, an improvement on the
telephone, usually a new transmitter. They were free-souled creatures,
excellent company: sensitive, cheerful, and profane; liars, braggarts,
and hustlers; with an air of making slow old England hum which never
left them even when, as often happened, they were wrestling with
difficulties of their own making, or struggling in no-thoroughfares from
which they had to be retrieved like strayed sheep by Englishmen without
imagination enough to go wrong.

In this environment I remained for some months. As I was interest