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.
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