Herb looked interested.
"Of course, on the open-hearth you pick them up with a tongs, when they're red-hot, and cool them in water."
Herb nodded.
"So there are always halves of test-ingots on the floor, cold. On the blast-furnace the stove-tender pours the test and knocks it out of the mould. Iron breaks easier than steel, so he never bothers to cool the ingot, but breaks it red-hot. Last Wednesday I wander up from the stoves when the furnace is ready to tap. The blower kicks busted halves of a test-ingot out of the way, and somebody says, 'A little too much sulphur.' I'm ambitious to learn iron smelting, too, and think I'll study the fracture. I walk in front of the blower and pick up the test."
Herb grinned.
"It wasn't red-hot," I went on; "but it had blackened over—just. I dropped it, and snapped my hand three feet behind me. The blower, the stove-tender, the first, second, and third helpers, and the assistant superintendent, who were all gathered, enjoyed the thing all over the place for several minutes. It gave them a good time for the afternoon."
When I left Herb, I took a walk through the Greek and Slavic quarters, and stopped a while on Superintendent's Hill, to study the graded superiority of foremen and superintendents. There were excellent little houses here, though too young and new to express any other character than moderate prosperity. Perhaps it was an ungracious thing to demand more.
I walked on, past farms, and up and down considerable hills. I lay down on the ground, in high grass, under apple trees which were near a tumble-down stone wall. It was enormously satisfactory to lie in the high grass, under an apple tree, listening to the small August noises—for a swift hour and a half.
After supper, I wanted badly to take a look at furnace fires against a night sky, and stepped out alone to do it. Close to the railroad station I set foot on the hill, and climbed past a Greek hotel and staggering tenements to a ridge. From there I could look over multitudinous roofs to the flat spaces by the river, where the mills roared and shone.
I heard heavy things dropped here and there over acres of plate flooring; they melted into a roar. The even whirr of the power house increased it, and the shrieks of machinery gave it a streaky quality. There were staccato punctuations, of course, by the whistles, and when a distant "blaw" came to me, I thought how loudly it drove into the ears of the hot-blast man, turning his wheel by a stove. But it was mostly the summed-up roar that occupied your head—an insistent thing, that made you excited and weary at the same time. The mills had been running for ten years; they always had a night-shift in Bouton.