"I suppose we might as well have in one of those voyageur chaps, just to see what he thinks of it!"
And they usually had him in.
THE BRIDGE-BUILDER
I
IN WHICH WE VISIT A PLACE OF UNUSUAL FEARS AND PERILS
AS I went time and again to the great East River Bridge, the new one whose huge steel towers were drawing to full height in the last months of the century, I found myself under a growing impression that here at last was a business with not only danger in it, but fear of danger. Divers and steeple-climbers I had seen who pronounced their work perfectly safe (though I knew better), and balloonists of the same mind about perils of the air; there were none, they declared, despite a list of deaths to prove the contrary. And so on with others. But here on the bridge were men who showed by little things, and sometimes admitted, that they were afraid of the black-ribbed monster. And it seemed to me that these were men with the best kind of grit in them, for although they were afraid of the bridge, they were not afraid of their fear, and they stuck to their job week after week, month after month, facing the same old peril until—well—
I came upon this fear of the bridge the very first time I sought leave to go upon the unfinished structure. It was in a little shanty of an office on the Brooklyn side, where, after some talk, I suggested to an assistant engineer, bent over his plans, that I would like to take a picture or two from the top of the tower. That seemed a simple enough thing.