years and have not yet learned that it will burn. Those hills produced
gypsies who travel around cheating, dickering and selling gewgaws that
are worth nothing. They come among a people who have used their heads.
From these people they learned to heat a banana stand with a little coal
stove. Having mastered that coal-stove principle, they are going back to
their native hills with black magic up their sleeves.

"What a superior man am I," thought that young tribesman swollen with
vanity, although he had done nothing.

This taught me that some of these thick-headed tribes can be all swelled
up with pride when they have little to be proud of.

CHAPTER XV. THE IRON BISCUITS

In the Sharon town band I played the clarinet from the time I was
thirteen until I left that town several years later to chase the
fireflies of vanishing jobs that marked the last administration of
Cleveland. A bands-man at thirteen, I became a master puddler at
sixteen. At that time there were but five boys of that age who had
become full-fledged puddlers. Of these young iron workers, I suppose
there were few that "doubled in brass." But why should not an iron
worker be a musician? The anvil, symbol of his trade, is a musical
instrument and is heard in the anvil chorus from Trovatore. In our
rolling mill we did not have an anvil on which the "bloom" was beaten
by a trip-hammer as is done in the Old Country. The "squeezer" which
combines the functions of hammer and anvil did the work instead.

When I became my father's helper he began teaching me to handle the
machinery of the trade. The puddling furnace has a working door on a
level with a man's stomach. Working door is a trade name. Out in the
world all doors are working; if they don't work they aren't doors
(except cellar doors, which are nailed down under the Volstead Act).
But the working door of a puddling furnace is the door through which the
puddler does his work. It is a porthole opening upon a sea of flame. The
heat of these flames would wither a man's body, and so they are enclosed
in a shell of steel. Through this working door I put in the charge of
"pigs" that were to be boiled. These short pieces of "mill iron" had
been smelted from iron ore; they had taken the first step on their
journey from wild iron to civilized iron. There isn't much use for
pig-iron in this world. You've got to be better iron than that. Pig-iron
has no fiber; it breaks instead of bending. Build a bridge of