ife-blades,--and he turns the crude iron into
the finest cambric needles, with eyes cut with microscopic exactness.
The production of the invisible points requires a more delicate
process, a finer grade of skill than the cutler possesses.

This feat the last workman considers marvelous, and he thinks he has
exhausted the possibilities of the iron. He has multiplied many times
the value of the cutler's product.

But, behold! another very skilful mechanic, with a more finely
organized mind, a more delicate touch, more patience, more industry, a
higher order of skill, and a better training, passes with ease by the
horse-shoes, the knife-blades, and the needles, and returns the product
of his bar in fine mainsprings for watches. Where the others saw
horseshoes, knife-blades, or needles, worth only a few thousand
dollars, his penetrating eye saw a product worth one hundred thousand
dollars.

A higher artist-artisan appears, who tells us that the rough bar has
not even yet found its highest expression; that he possesses the magic
that can perform a still greater miracle in iron. To him, even
main-springs seem coarse and clumsy. He knows that the crude iron can
be manipulated and coaxed into an elasticity that can not even be
imagined by one less trained in metallurgy. He knows that, if care
enough be used in tempering the steel, it will not be stiff, trenchant,
and merely a passive metal, but so full of its new qualities that it
almost seems instinct with life.

With penetrating, almost clairvoyant vision, this artist-artisan sees
how every process of mainspring making can be carried further; and how,
at every stage of manufacture, more perfection can be reached; how the
texture of the metal can be so much refined that even a fiber, a
slender thread of it, can do marvelous work. He puts his bar through
many processes of refinement and fine tempering, and, in triumph, turns
his product into almost invisible coils of delicate hair-springs.
After infinite toil and pain, he has made his dream true; he has raised
the few dollars' worth of iron to a value of one million dollars,
perhaps forty times the value of the same weight of gold.

Still another workman, whose processes are so almost infinitely
delicate, whose product is so little known, by even the average
educated man, that his trade is unmentioned by the makers of
dictionaries and encylopedias, takes but a fragment of one of the bars
of steel, and develops its h