beneath the eyes of a startled population. I could have gazed at it to
this day, and brooded to this day upon the human imaginations that had
perfected it; but I was led off, hypnotized, to see the furnaces and
boilers under the earth. And even there we were almost alone, to such an
extent had one sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge of
another sort of senseless matter. The odyssey of the coal that was
lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the
furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by
itself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million
cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these
stoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators. The lowest horror of
the steamship had been abolished here.

I was tempted to say: "This alone is fit to be called the heart of New
York!"

They took me to the twin palace, and on the windy way thither figures
were casually thrown at me. As that a short circuit may cause the
machines to surge wildly into the sudden creation of six million
horse-power of electricity, necessitating the invention of other
machines to control automatically these perilous vagaries! As that in
the down-town district the fire-engine was being abolished because, at a
signal, these power-houses could in thirty seconds concentrate on any
given main a pressure of three hundred pounds to the square inch,
lifting jets of water perhaps above the roofs of sky-scrapers! As that
the city could fine these power-houses at the rate of five hundred
dollars a minute for any interruption of the current longer than three
minutes--but the current had never failed for a single second! As that
in one year over two million dollars' worth of machinery had been
scrapped!... And I was aware that it was New York I was in, and not