They will get--a Ford. On holidays they may go see the great automobile races on the speedway at Indianapolis Indiana. Not for them the flashing thoroughbreds or the sturdy trotters and pacers. Not for them freedom, laughter. For them machines. Long ago that Judge Turner had corrupted my mind. He played me a hell of a trick. I have been going about trying to have thoughts. What a fool I have been! I have read many books of history, many stories of men’s lives. Why did I not go to college and get a safe education? I might have worked my way through and got my mind fixed in a comfortable mold. There is no excuse for me. I shall have to pay for my lack of a proper training. In the next room to the one in which I am lying two men are talking. FIRST VOICE. “He took straw, ground it, put it into some kind of rubber composition. The whole was mixed up together and subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. It came out a tough kind of composition that can be made to look like wood. It can be grained like wood. He will get rich. I tell you he is one of the great minds of the age.” SECOND VOICE. “We shall have prohibition after a while and then you’ll see how it will turn out. You can’t down the American mind. Some fellow will make a drink, a synthetic drink. It won’t cost much to make. Perhaps it can be made out of crude oil like gasoline and then the Standard will take him up. He’ll get rich. We Americans can’t be put down, I’ll tell you that.” FIRST VOICE. “There is a man in New York makes car wheels out of paper. It is ground, I suppose, and made into a kind of mush and then is subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. The wheels look like iron.” SECOND VOICE. “Do you suppose he paints them black like iron?” FIRST VOICE. “It’s a great age we live in. You can’t down machinery. I read a book by Mark Twain. He knocked theories cold, I’ll tell you what. He made out all life was just a great machine.” * * * * * Where am I? Am I dreaming or am I awake? It seems to me that I am somewhere in a great empty place. I shall have one of my terrible fits of depression if I am not careful now. Sometimes I walk gayly along the streets and talk to men and women gayly but there are other times when I am so depressed that all the muscles of my body ache. I am like one on whose back a great beast sits. Now it seems to me I am in a huge empty place. Has the roof of a factory in which I was at work at night fallen in? There is a long shaft of yellow light falling down a beam of wood or marble. Thoughts flitting, an effort to awaken out of dreams, voices heard, voices talking somewhere in the distance, the figures of men and women I have known flashing in and out of darkness. There is a tiny faint voice speaking: “The money-makers will grow weary and disgusted with their own money-making and labor shall have lost all faith, all sense of the cunning of the hand. The factory hands shall rule. What a mess it will be!”