The machine shop is one room, with a glass roof, covering an area of something less than thirty acres. It is simply unbelievable in its size, its noise and its ghastly furious activity. It was peopled when we were there by five thousand men--the day shift in that one shop alone. (The total force of workmen was something like three times that number.) Of course there was order in that place, of course there was system--relentless system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind, unaccustomed to such things, the whole room, with its interminable aisles, its whirling shafts and wheels, its forest of roof-supporting posts and flapping, flying, leather belting, its endless rows of writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell of oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population--to my mind it expressed but one thing, and that thing was delirium. Fancy a jungle of wheels and belts and weird iron forms--of men, machinery and movement--add to it every kind of sound you can imagine: the sound of a million squirrels chirking, a million monkeys quarreling, a million lions roaring, a million pigs dying, a million elephants smashing through a forest of sheet iron, a million boys whistling on their fingers, a million others coughing with the whooping cough, a million sinners groaning as they are dragged to hell--imagine all of this happening at the very edge of Niagara Falls, with the everlasting roar of the cataract as a perpetual background, and you may acquire a vague conception of that place. Fancy all this riot going on at once; then imagine the effect of its suddenly ceasing. For that is what it did. The wheels slowed down and became still. The belts stopped flapping. The machines lay dead. The noise faded to a murmur; then to utter silence. Our ears rang with the quiet. The aisles all at once were full of men in overalls, each with a paper package or a box. Some of them walked swiftly toward the exits. Others settled down on piles of automobile parts, or the bases of machines, to eat, like grimy soldiers on a battlefield. It was the lull of noon.