of some great
dark, dingy devil grinning across the smoky vapors of the Pit. Half
naked, soot-smeared fellows fight the furnace hearths with hooks,
rabbles and paddles. Their scowling faces are lit with fire, like
sailors manning their guns in a night fight when a blazing fire ship
is bearing down upon them. The sweat runs down their backs and arms and
glistens in the changing lights. Brilliant blues and rays of green and
bronze come from the coruscating metal, molten yet crystallizing into
white-hot frost within the furnace puddle. Flaming balls of woolly iron
are pulled from the oven doors, flung on a two-wheeled serving tray, and
rushed sputtering and flamboyant to the hungry mouth of a machine,
which rolls them upon its tongue and squeezes them in its jaw like a cow
mulling over her cud. The molten slag runs down red-hot from the jaws of
this squeezer and makes a luminous rivulet on the floor like the water
from the rubber rollers when a washer-woman wrings out the saturated
clothes. Squeezed dry of its luminous lava, the white-hot sponge is
drawn with tongs to the waiting rollers--whirling anvils that beat
it into the shape they will. Everywhere are hurrying men, whirring
flywheels, moving levers of steam engines and the drum-like roar of the
rolling machines, while here and there the fruits of this toil are seen
as three or four fiery serpents shoot forth from different trains of
rollers, and are carried away, wrought iron fit for bridging the creek,
shoeing the mule and hooping the barrel that brings the farmers apples
into town.

"Life in these mills is a terrible life," the reformers say. "Men are
ground down to scrap and are thrown out as wreckage." This may be so,
but my life was spent in the mills and I failed to discover it. I
went in a stripling and grew into manhood with muscled arms big as a
bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say, will destroy a man's lungs,
but I worked all day in the mills and had wind enough left to toot a
clarinet in the band. I lusted for labor, I worked and I liked it.
And so did my forefathers for generations before me. It is no job for
weaklings, but neither was tree-felling, Indian fighting, road-making
and the subduing of a wild continent to the hand of man as was done by
the whole tribe of Americans for the sheer joy of conquering the wild.

There is something in man that drives him forward to do the world's work
and build bigger for the coming generations, just as there is s