orth the trouble. If it were not that you must have
heard it so often, Kirby, I would tell you that your works look like
Dante's Inferno."

Kirby laughed.

"Yes. Yonder is Farinata himself in the burning tomb,"--pointing to some
figure in the shimmering shadows.

"Judging from some of the faces of your men," said the other, "they bid
fair to try the reality of Dante's vision, some day."

Young Kirby looked curiously around, as if seeing the faces of his hands
for the first time.

"They're bad enough, that's true. A desperate set, I fancy. Eh, Clarke?"

The overseer did not hear him. He was talking of net profits just
then,--giving, in fact, a schedule of the annual business of the firm to
a sharp peering little Yankee, who jotted down notes on a paper laid on
the crown of his hat: a reporter for one of the city-papers, getting up
a series of reviews of the leading manufactories. The other gentlemen
had accompanied them merely for amusement. They were silent until the
notes were finished, drying their feet at the furnaces, and sheltering
their faces from the intolerable heat. At last the overseer concluded
with--"I believe that is a pretty fair estimate, Captain."

"Here, some of you men!" said Kirby, "bring up those boards. We may as
well sit down, gentlemen, until the rain is over. It cannot last much
longer at this rate."

"Pig-metal,"--mumbled the reporter,--"um!--coal facilities,--um!--hands
employed, twelve hundred,--bitumen,--um!--'all right, I believe, Mr.
Clarke;--sinking-fund,--what did you say was your sinking-fund?"

"Twelve hundred hands?" said the stranger, the young man who had first
spoken. "Do you control their votes, Kirby?"

"Control? No." The young man smiled complacently. "But my father brought
seven hundred votes to the polls for his candidate last November. No
force-work, you understand,--only a speech or two, a hint to form
themselves into a society, and a bit of red and blue bunting to make
them a flag. The Invincible Roughs,--I believe that is their name. I
forget the motto: 'Our country's hope,' I think."

There was a laugh. The young man talking to Kirby sat with an amused
light in his cool gray eye, surveying critically the half-clothed
figures of the puddlers, and the slow swing of their brawny muscles. He
was a stranger in the city,--spending a couple of months in the
borders of a Slave State, to study the institutions of the South,--a
brother-in-law of Kirby's,--Mitchell. He w