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 Danæ 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