Whilst the Edison Telephone Company lasted, it crowded the basement of a huge pile of offices in Queen Victoria Street with American artificers.

These deluded and romantic men gave me a glimpse of the skilled proletariat of the United States.

They sang obsolete sentimental songs with genuine emotion; and their language was frightful even to an Irishman.

They worked with a ferocious energy which was out of all proportion to the actual result achieved.

Indomitably resolved to assert their republican manhood by taking no orders from a tall-hatted Englishman whose stiff politeness covered his conviction that they were, relatively to himself, inferior and common persons, they insisted on being slave-driven with genuine American oaths by a genuine free and equal American foreman.