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THE DRAGON IN SHALLOW WATERS
The dragon in shallow waters became the buttof shrimps.—Chinese Proverb.
I
An immense gallery, five hundred feet long, occupiedthe upper floor of the main factory-building.Looking down the gallery, a perspective of irongirders spanned the roof, gaunt skeletons of architecture,uncompromising, inexorably utilitarian, inflexible,remorseless. A drone of machinery filledthe air, neither very loud nor very near at hand, butsoftly and unremittingly continuous; the drone ofclanking, of loosely-running wheels and leatherbelts, muffled by the intervening floor into a notunpleasant murmur. Outside the windows threechimneys reared their heads side by side, emittingthree parallel streams of smoke, gigantic blackplumes that floated horizontally away over theflooded country, and that at night were flecked withred sparks as they flowed out from the red glareat their base.
4All these things, the chimneys and the girders,were crushingly larger than the men who labouredamongst them. The men seemed of pigmy size asthey pushed their hand-trucks along the floor of thebig gallery. They pushed them down the narrowpassage-ways left between the vats. The gallerywas full of vats, set in pairs down the whole lengthof the building; square vats twenty feet each way,as larg