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So Holmes was popular, though the beggars shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders never held their tambourines up to him. The mill street was dark; the building threw its great shadow over the square. It was empty, he supposed; only one hand generally remained to keep in the furnace-fires. Going through one of the lower passages, he heard voices, and turned aside to examine.

Now Pu was the most cunning of all the P'ei-se-kong, the men who marry colors together; of all the Hoa-yang-kong, who draw the shapes of vase-decoration; of all the Hoei-sse-kong, who paint in enamel; of all the T'ien-thsai-kong, who brighten color; of all the Chao-lou-kong, who watch the furnace-fires and the porcelain-ovens.

Then we saunter about the place, and, seeing a woman eying us suspiciously from an elevated window, we show the white feather and ask her if we may come in, which, seeing we have been in for some ten minutes, we undoubtedly may; and then we mount the ramparts and peer into Labrador and Hudson's Bay and the North Pole, and, turning to a softer sky, gaze from a "foreign clime" upon our own dear land, home of freedom, hope of the nations, eye-sore of the Devil, rent by one set of his minions, and ridiculed by another, but coming out of her furnace-fires, if God please and man will, heartier and holier, because freer and truer, than ever before.

Other methods of heating the air, besides those mentioned, include coils of iron flue-pipes in a brick chamber a principle that has been frequently adopted in the past and plain cylindrical iron radiating stoves, such as employed at the Hammam in Jermyn Street. In the latter plan, however, a great expense is created by the large number of furnace-fires to be kept constantly burning.

One may easily imagine the stupid alarm and helpless confusion of these easy-going monks, when their new Superior came down among them hissing with a white heat from the very hottest furnace-fires of a new religious experience, burning and quivering with the terrors of the world to come, pale, thin, eager, tremulous, and yet with all the martial vigor of the former warrior, and all the habits of command of a former princely station.

He is in favor of the great interests of labor, and opposed to such tinkering with the tariff as will make vain the toil of the industrious farmer, paralyze the arm of the sturdy mechanic, strike down the hand of the hardy laborer, stop the spindle, hush the loom, extinguish the furnace-fires, and degrade all independent toilers to the level of the poor in other lands.

The slowly gathering ferruginous deposits have been exhausted, and three years have elapsed since the furnace-fires were lighted. The blackened shell of the building stands in cold decrepitude, a melancholy vestige of usefulness outlived.

It is like looking into hell and watching the fury of supernatural forces at play with human bodies, tearing them to pieces with great splinters of steel and burning them in the furnace-fires of shell-stricken towns, and in a devilish way obliterating the image of humanity in a welter of blood. There is a beauty in it too, for the aestheticism of a Nero.

So Holmes was popular, though the beggars shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders never held their tambourines up to him. The mill street was dark; the building threw its great shadow over the square. It was empty, he supposed; only one hand generally remained to keep in the furnace-fires. Going through one of the lower passages, he heard voices, and turned aside to examine.

That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs. While the servants talked in the kitchen the master had been sitting quietly in the darkening study. All without and within the man was eddying, swirling blackness. Heat beat and glowed upon his forehead, like the radiation from molten metal; there was a winnowing and fanning as of giant wings or leaping of furnace-fires.