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RV 100 (WORK IN LONDON) works. A hand must commence by being a good and an industrious workman, but he must also, if he is to rise, give the impression of being very much alive and very much interested in his work. I am thinking of a case in point in some rather small works of the sort. Here there is a managing foreman whom I will call Stanley. He is perhaps twenty-nine. These works were started to work a new process about twelve years ago, and Stanley, at the time a boy, helped in making the bed of the first engine. He was particularly alert, and entered into the spirit of the thing. This at the time was not very obvious, the engine being set down on the slope of a green hill into which it has since tunnelled and cut until an arena of sand, of rubble and of chalk, opens an immense face to the lower Thames. It shelters alike on its flat surface a huge cement factory, sand works, and a large brickfield. Immense chimney shafts like thin pencils pierce up into the lower clouds; the ground is sticky and white under foot, channelled with open conduits of hot water, a maze of small lines on which run tiny locomotives, a maze of the little black shelters that cover drying bricks.

In the midst of these gray and monstrous apparitions, in the faint and sickly odour of steam, under the drops that condense and fall from the eaves of engine sheds, clambering through small holes, dressed in dull clothes, clean shaven and with sparkling eyes, Stanley moves like a spirit of romance. If he chances upon a visitor he becomes almost a spirit in ecstasy. He slaps the bed of the engine that he helped to set there, he 100