A very faint humming sound filled the room, and made a somewhat uncanny accompaniment to the leisurely tick of the clock and the irregular shuffling of the doctor's slippered feet. Every now and then he stopped, and put his ear near to the machine, and then looked at the piece of steel with a gleam of longing anticipation in his keen, deep-set, grey eyes. Then he began his walk again, and his lips went on working, as though he were holding an inaudible conversation with himself. At last there came a faint whirr from the clock, a little window opened, and a wooden bird bobbed out and said "Cuckoo" once. The doctor stopped instantly, took out his watch and compared it with the clock. "Now, let us see!" he said, quietly, in his somewhat guttural Alsatian French, for in this supreme moment of his life he had gone back to the patois of his boyhood, which he had spoken in the days before the Teuton's iron hand had snatched his well-loved native land from France and begun to rule it according to the pitiless doctrine of Blood and Iron. He pulled the platter out from under the machine, picked up a little wooden mallet from the table, and, with a trembling hand, struck the steel plate in the centre. It splintered instantly to fragments, as though it had only been a thin sheet of glass. The doctor dropped the mallet, lifted his hand to the window that looked out over the river towards the citadel, and said: "It is done! And so, Germany, stealer of our land and oppressor of my people, will I break the great fabric of your power with one touch of this weak old hand of mine!" Then he threw open one of the old-fashioned dormer windows that looked out over the northern part of the city towards France, and began to speak again in a low, intense tone which rose and fell slightly as his deep breaths came and went. "But France, my beautiful mother France, thou shalt know soon that I have done more than given thee the power to turn on thy conqueror and crush him. I can make thee queen and mistress of the world, and I will do it. The other nations shall live and prosper only at thy bidding, and they shall pay thee tribute for the privilege of being something more than the savages from which they came. "Those who will not pay thee tribute shall go back to the Stone Age, for I will show thee how to make their metals useless. Only with thy permission shall their steam-engines work for them, or their telegraphs record their words; for I have found the Soul of the World, the Living Principle of Material Things, and I will draw it out of the fabric of Nature as I have done out of that block of steel. And I will give it into thy hands, and the nations shall live or die according to thy pleasure.