tent flap and mingle with the clowns and elephants, I chucked my
job sorting nails when I found an opening for a youngster in the
rolling mill. Every puddler has a helper. Old men have both a
helper and a boy. I got a place with an old man, and so at the
age of twelve I was part of the Big Show whose performance is
continuous, whose fire-eaters have real flame to contend with,
and whose snake-charmers risk their lives in handling great
hissing, twisting red-hot serpents of angry iron.

In this mill there is a constant din by day and night. Patches
of white heat glare from the opened furnace doors like the teeth
of some great dark, dingy devil grinning across the smoky vapors
of the Pit. Half naked, soot-smeared fellows fight the furnace
hearths with hooks, rabbles and paddles. Their scowling faces are
lit with fire, like sailors manning their guns in a night fight
when a blazing fire ship is bearing down upon them. The sweat
runs down their backs and arms and glistens in the changing
lights. Brilliant blues and rays of green and bronze come from
the coruscating metal, molten yet crystallizing into white-hot
frost within the furnace puddle. Flaming balls of woolly iron are
pulled from the oven doors, flung on a two-wheeled serving tray,
and rushed sputtering and flamboyant to the hungry mouth of a
machine, which rolls them upon its tongue and squeezes them in
its jaw like a cow mulling over her cud. The molten slag runs
down red-hot from the jaws of this squeezer and makes a luminous
rivulet on the floor like the water from the rubber rollers when
a washer-woman wrings out the saturated clothes. Squeezed dry of
its luminous lava, the white-hot sponge is drawn with tongs to
the waiting rollers--whirling anvils that beat it into the shape
they will. Everywhere are hurrying men, whirring flywheels,