it and
a gale will break it and it will fall into the river. Some races are
pig-iron; Hottentots and Bushmen are pig-iron. They break at a blow.
They have been smelted out of wild animalism, but they went no further;
they are of no use in this modern world because they are brittle. Only
the wrought-iron races can do the work. All this I felt but could not
say in the days when I piled the pig-iron in the puddling furnace and
turned with boyish eagerness to have my father show me how.

Six hundred pounds was the weight of pig-iron we used to put into a
single hearth. Much wider than the hearth was the fire grate, for we
needed a heat that was intense. The flame was made by burning bituminous
coal. Vigorously I stoked that fire for thirty minutes with dampers open
and the draft roaring while that pig-iron melted down like ice-cream
under an electric fan. You have seen a housewife sweating over her oven
to get it hot enough to bake a batch of biscuits. Her face gets pink and
a drop of sweat dampens her curls. Quite a horrid job she finds it. But
I had iron biscuits to bake; my forge fire must be hot as a volcano.
There were five bakings every day and this meant the shoveling in of
nearly two tons of coal. In summer I was stripped to the waist and
panting while the sweat poured down across my heaving muscles. My palms
and fingers, scorched by the heat, became hardened like goat hoofs,
while my skin took on a coat of tan that it will wear forever.

What time I was not stoking the fire, I was stirring the charge with a
long iron rabble that weighed some twenty-five pounds. Strap an Oregon
boot of that weight to your arm and then do calisthenics ten hours in a
room so hot it melts your eyebrows and you will know what it is like to
be a puddler. But we puddlers did not complain. There is men's work to
be done in this world, and we were the men to do it. We had come into a
country built of wood; we should change it to a country built of steel
and stone. There was grandeur for us to achieve, like the Roman who
said, "I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble."

The spirit of building was in our blood; we took pride in the mill, and
the mill owners were our captains. They honored us for our strength and
skill, they paid us and we were loyal to them. We showed what bee men
call "the spirit of the hive." On holidays our ball team played against
the team of a neighboring mill, and the owners and bosses were on the
s