He crossed the road and went into the darkness towards the little steps under the archway leading into Essex Street, and I let him go.  And that was the last I ever saw of him.

Afterwards I had two letters from him asking me to send bank-notes—­not cheques—­to certain addresses.  I weighed the matter over and took what I conceived to be the wisest course.  Once he called upon me when I was out.  My urchin described him as a very thin, dirty, and ragged man, with a dreadful cough.  He left no message.  That was the finish of him so far as my story goes.  I wonder sometimes what has become of him.  Was he an ingenious monomaniac, or a fraudulent dealer in pebbles, or has he really made diamonds as he asserted?  The latter is just sufficiently credible to make me think at times that I have missed the most brilliant opportunity of my life.  He may of course be dead, and his diamonds carelessly thrown aside—­one, I repeat, was almost as big as my thumb.  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.  Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black, and the whites of his eyes were yellow.  His broad cheekbones and narrow chin gave his face something of the viperine V. His head, too, was broad behind, and low and narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had been twisted round in the reverse way to a European’s.  He was short of stature and still shorter of English.  In conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known marketable value, and his infrequent words were carved and wrought into heraldic grotesqueness.  Holroyd tried to elucidate his religious beliefs, and—­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.