Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country’s twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste; so presently I found myself in a great hall, of which I have no clearer impression than that there were soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like the rippling of Pactolus.  I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden shovels; and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danae have felt as she stood amid the falling shower.  But I took care to see that my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all that.

Once more in the street, I lingered a while to take a last look at the Falls.  What a masterful alien life it all seemed to me!  No single personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous, bullying forces.  Only public companies, and such great impersonalities, could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool—­and even they, I had heard it whispered, far away in my quiet starlit garret, sometimes went down.  ‘How,’ I cried, ’would—­

  ’... my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights ... 
  Rush of suns, and roll of systems, and your fiery clash of meteorites,’

again quoting poetry.  I always quote poetry in the City, as a protest—­moreover, it clears the air.

The more people buffeted against me the more I felt the crushing sense of almost cosmic forces.  Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human energy—­companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for the most part, to be had for thirty shillings a week.  These people about me seemed no more like individual men and women than individual puffs in a mighty rushing wind, or the notes in a great scheme of music, are men and women—­to the banker so many pens with ears whereon to perch them, to the capitalist so many ‘hands,’ and to the City man generally so many ‘helpless pieces of the game he plays’ up there in spidery nooks and corners of the City.

As I listened to the throbbing of the great human engines in the buildings about me, a rising and a falling there seemed as of those great steel-limbed monsters, weird contortionists of metal, that jet up and down, and writhe and wrestle this way and that, behind the long glass windows of great water-towers, or toil like Vulcan in the bowels of mighty ships.  An expression of frenzy seems to come up even from the dumb tossing steel; sometimes it seems to be shaking great knuckled fists at one and brandishing threatening arms, as it strains and sweats beneath the lash of the compulsive steam.  As one watches it, there seems something of human agony about its panic-stricken labours, and something like a sense of pity surprises