moving levers of steam engines and the drum-like roar of the
rolling machines, while here and there the fruits of this toil
are seen as three or four fiery serpents shoot forth from
different trains of rollers, and are carried away, wrought iron
fit for bridging the creek, shoeing the mule and hooping the
barrel that brings the farmers apples into town.

"Life in these mills is a terrible life," the reformers say.
"Men are ground down to scrap and are thrown out as wreckage."
This may be so, but my life was spent in the mills and I failed
to discover it. I went in a stripling and grew into manhood with
muscled arms big as a bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say,
will destroy a man's lungs, but I worked all day in the mills and
had wind enough left to toot a clarinet in the band. I lusted for
labor, I worked and I liked it. And so did my forefathers for
generations before me. It is no job for weaklings, but neither
was tree-felling, Indian fighting, road-making and the subduing
of a wild continent to the hand of man as was done by the whole
tribe of Americans for the sheer joy of conquering the wild.

There is something in man that drives him forward to do the
world's work and build bigger for the coming generations, just as
there is something in nature that causes new growth to come out
of old dirt and new worlds to be continually spawned from the
ashes of old played-out suns and stars. When nature ceases to
mold new worlds from the past decay, the universe will wither;
and when man loses the urge to build and goes to tearing down,
the end of his story is at hand.

A tired Thomas whose wife supported him by running a rooming