René kept the manuscript and read it during his off hours on the stands. It began nobly on foolscap, in a bold, spiky hand, and ended pitifully on old envelopes and leaves torn out of penny account books or yellowing sheets from ancient volumes. Thirty lines were written on the back of the title page of a copy of _The City of Dreadful Night_. It was some time before he could find his way through the manuscript. The sheets were not numbered, and they were in no sort of order. Slowly he pieced the poem together, and perceived that it was an epic in ten cantos, blank verse varied with odes. It was called _Lucifer on Earth, or the Rise and Fall of British Industry_, and it was many days before its first reader could make anything out of its confusion. The Gods change: it is difficult to make anything in this century of the God of 1860. Clearly Jethro Lunt hated that God. In fierce rhetoric he denounced His claim to omnipotence, but where exactly his grievance lay, it was impossible to discover. Lucifer in the poem struggled out of Hell, and, catching the Almighty in a moment of boredom, unseated Him and sent Him down to the Infernal Regions for a space to see how He would do there, and afterward, in his spleen, commanded Him to dwell on earth. So God arrived one day in a village in Derbyshire, and, acting upon the commercial principles always employed in his dealings with man, got the inhabitants to apply the mental processes till then only used in the practice of religion, to their everyday life. Then the community became possessed of a horrid energy, set love of gain above love of life, and soon the old, quiet society of squire, farmer, and laborer was broken up, mills were built in the village, their great stacks belched forth smoke over the hills so that the heather was dirty to lie upon; the women left their homes to work in the mills, and children were taken to help them. And wherever God went, the same thing happened.