iron workers learned to puddle forge iron and make it into
wrought iron which is tough and leathery and can not be broken by
a blow. This process was handed down from father to son, and in
the course of time came to my father and so to me. None of us
ever went to school and learned the chemistry of it from books.
We learned the trick by doing it, standing with our faces in the
scorching heat while our hands puddled the metal in its glaring
bath.

And that is the way the farmer's son has learned hog scalding
from the time when our ancient fathers got tired of eating
bristles and decided to take their pork clean shaven. To-day
there are books telling just how many degrees of heat make the
water right for scalding hogs, and the metallurgists have written
down the chemical formula for puddling iron. But the man who
learns it from a book can not do it. The mental knowledge is not
enough; it requires great muscular skill like that of the
heavyweight wrestler, besides great physical endurance to
withstand the terrific heat. The worker's body is in perfect
physical shape and the work does not injure him but only
exhilarates him. No iron worker can be a communist, for
communists all have inferior bodies. The iron worker knows that
his body is superior, and no sour philosophy could stay in him,
because he would sweat it out of his pores as he sweats out all
other poisons.

The old man that I worked with when I first entered the rolling
mill was gray with his sixty years of toil. Yet his eye was clear
and his back was straight and when he went to the table he ate
like a sixteen-year-old and his sleep was dreamless. A man so old