es, the Swedes excel in the manufacture of iron. To fully
appreciate the value of this industry, one should visit Gefle, the
most important shipping point on the eastern coast of Sweden. Here
there is a fine harbor, with docks and warehouses owned by the
government. From this port the ore from the mines of central Sweden
is shipped to all parts of the world and handled by Brown hoisting
machinery, which is made in Cleveland, Ohio--the same that you see on
the ore docks at South Chicago and at Cleveland, Buffalo, Ashtabula,
and other points on the Great Lakes where iron ore and coal are
handled.

At Gefle, too, an annual industrial exposition is held, where you
may see on exhibit all the utensils manufactured or used by the
people--all kinds of machinery, tools, and implements, recent
novelties in patents, weaving, wood-carving, and a large part of the
exposition building is given up to beautiful articles in iron, in the
manufacture of which we have said the Swedes excel.

A little west of Gefle is the town of Fahlun, which is the
headquarters of the Kopparberg Mining Company, the, oldest industrial
corporation in the world. The buildings date back to the seventeenth
century and the mines are even more ancient. A mortgage bond was filed
upon them in the year 1288 by a German company, and the records show
that in 1347 the privilege of working them was sold by the king of
Sweden to a syndicate of Lubeck miners. But these documents which are
on file in the archives of the town are comparatively modern, because
the copper deposits at Fahlun were known and worked in prehistoric
times, and from them the Vikings obtained the sheathings for their
ships and the material from which their copper armor, implements, and
utensils were made. An immense amount of copper was used and worked
with great skill in Scandinavia even before the Christian era, and the
most of it came from the great deposits at Fahlun.

The iron industry is old in Sweden. Isaac Breant, a tradesman in
Stockholm, founded a company and received a charter from Charles XI in
1685. He built the first blast furnace in Sweden, and died in 1702,
leaving the property to his son, who died in 1720. The heirs sold out
in 1722 to a man named Grill, in whose family the property remained
until 1800, when it was purchased by the ancestors of the present
owners.

The famous Dannemora mines, which produce the best Bessemer ore in the
world, have been worked continuously since