elucidate his religious beliefs, and--especially after
whiskey--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
stoke-hole 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 had 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 have been there since the beginning are 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 d