presence and unconsciously showed it by putting on extra
"steam." With swinging step the big figure crossed the packing room. The
gray-white face held straight ahead, but the keen blue eyes paused upon
each worker and each task. And every "hand" in those two great factories
knew how all-seeing that glance was--critical, but just; exacting, but
encouraging. All-seeing, in this instance, did not mean merely
fault-seeing.

Hiram Ranger, manufacturing partner and controlling owner of the
Ranger-Whitney Company of St. Christopher and Chicago, went on into the
cooperage, leaving energy behind him, rousing it before him. Many times,
each working day, between seven in the morning and six at night, he made
the tour of those two establishments. A miller by inheritance and
training, he had learned the cooper's trade like any journeyman, when he
decided that the company should manufacture its own barrels. He was not a
rich man who was a manufacturer; he was a manufacturer who was
incidentally rich--one who made of his business a vocation. He had no
theories on the dignity of labor; he simply exemplified it, and would
have been amazed, and amused or angered according to his mood, had it
been suggested to him that useful labor is not as necessary and
continuous a part of life as breathing. He did not speculate and talk
about ideals; he lived them, incessantly and unconsciously. The talker of
ideals and the liver of ideals get echo and response, each after his
kind--the talker, in the empty noise of applause; the liver, in the
silent spread of the area of achievement.

A moment after Hiram roused the packing room of the flour mill with the
master's eye, he was in the cooperage, the center of a group round one of
the hooping machines. It had got out of gear, and the workman had bungled
in shutting off power; the result was chaos that threatened to stop the
whole department for the rest of the day. Ranger brushed away the
wrangling tinkerers and examined the machine. After grasping the problem
in all its details, he threw himself flat upon his face, crawled under
the machine, and called for a light. A moment later his voice issued
again, in a call for a hammer. Several minutes of sharp hammering; then
the mass of iron began to heave. It rose at the upward pressure of
Ranger's powerful arms and legs, shoulders and back; it crashed over on
its side; he stood up and, without pause or outward sign of his exertion
of enormous strength, set