First, the scientific manager was gripped round the body and swung towards the big dynamo, then, kicking with his knee and forcing his antagonist’s head down with his hands, he loosened the grip on his waist and swung round away from the machine.  Then the black grasped him again, putting a curly head against his chest, and they swayed and panted as it seemed for an age or so.  Then the scientific manager was impelled to catch a black ear in his teeth and bite furiously.  The black yelled hideously.

They rolled over on the floor, and the black, who had apparently slipped from the vice of the teeth or parted with some ear—­the scientific manager wondered which at the time—­tried to throttle him.  The scientific manager was making some ineffectual attempts to claw something with his hands and to kick, when the welcome sound of quick footsteps sounded on the floor.  The next moment Azuma-zi had left him and darted towards the big dynamo.  There was a splutter amid the roar.

The officer of the company who had entered, stood staring as Azuma-zi caught the naked terminals in his hands, gave one horrible convulsion, and then hung motionless from the machine, his face violently distorted.

“I’m jolly glad you came in when you did,” said the scientific manager, still sitting on the floor.

He looked at the still quivering figure.

“It’s not a nice death to die, apparently—­but it is quick.”

The official was still staring at the body.  He was a man of slow apprehension.

There was a pause.

The scientific manager got up on his feet rather awkwardly.  He ran his fingers along his collar thoughtfully, and moved his head to and fro several times.

“Poor Holroyd!  I see now.”  Then almost mechanically he went towards the switch in the shadow and turned the current into the railway circuit again.  As he did so the singed body loosened its grip upon the machine and fell forward on its face.  The core of the dynamo roared out loud and clear, and the armature beat the air.

So ended prematurely the Worship of the Dynamo Deity, perhaps the most short-lived of all religions.  Yet withal it could at least boast a Martyrdom and a Human Sacrifice.

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND

Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador’s Andes, there lies that mysterious mountain valley, cut off from all the world of men, the Country of the Blind.  Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the world that men might come at last through frightful gorges and over an icy pass into its equable meadows, and thither indeed men came, a family or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and tyranny of an evil Spanish ruler.  Then came the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba, when it was night in Quito for seventeen days, and