Mary Jane wondered at all this fuss because she and Alice had been through factories at home and didn’t think much of it. But half an hour later, when they were in the middle of the great plant, she stopped wondering and clung to her father’s hand without being told. For the noise and confusion and wonder of it all was beyond anything she had ever dreamed of. Engines tooting and screeching, whistles blowing orders, men shouting, great kettles of red hot iron sizzling and smoking, clanging hammers pounding on metal, the clatter of tumbling scrap iron and the clang and clank of the finished steel rails as they were loaded on waiting freight cars made it a wonderland of sights and sounds.
Mary Jane held tight to her father’s hand and bravely went everywhere the big folks did. But she wasn’t sorry when, an hour later, she found herself seated on a quiet terrace on the fifteenth floor of Birmingham’s biggest office building, ordering her lunch.
After luncheon they walked all around the terrace and looked at the rows of mountains and the long stretch of valley dotted with huge smoke stacks of the various steel mills.
“And there,” said Uncle Will, pointing off into the distance, “is the place you were this morning.”
“Well,” said Mary Jane looking at it gravely, “I think I like it better over there than when it’s right here—it isn’t so noisy, far away.”
Uncle Will laughed and suggested that if he and Mary Jane went down stairs ahead of the others, it was just possible, just possible of course, that they might have time to buy a box of candy before the auto came around. And that settled sightseeing from the terrace.
All through the long beautiful afternoon they drove, seeing the busy streets of the city, driving up the winding roadways lined with beautiful homes and leading toward the mountains, and spinning along the ridge roads that took them over the mountain crests.
It was almost dark when they stopped at Uncle Will’s for their bags and they had to drive fast to get to the station in time for their train.
“Well!” sighed Mary Jane, as she dropped down in the broad seat of the Pullman car a few minutes later, “I think that’s a city where you do a lot!”
“And I think,” replied Mrs. Merrill, reaching down to kiss her little girl, “that I know somebody not so very far from here, who’s going to have dinner and go to bed just about as quick as a wink.”