furnace is the door through which the puddler does his work. It
is a porthole opening upon a sea of flame. The heat of these
flames would wither a man's body, and so they are enclosed in a
shell of steel. Through this working door I put in the charge of
"pigs" that were to be boiled. These short pieces of "mill iron"
had been smelted from iron ore; they had taken the first step on
their journey from wild iron to civilized iron. There isn't much
use for pig-iron in this world. You've got to be better iron than
that. Pig-iron has no fiber; it breaks instead of bending. Build
a bridge of it and a gale will break it and it will fall into the
river. Some races are pig-iron; Hottentots and Bushmen are pig-
iron. They break at a blow. They have been smelted out of wild
animalism, but they went no further; they are of no use in this
modern world because they are brittle. Only the wrought-iron
races can do the work. All this I felt but could not say in the
days when I piled the pig-iron in the puddling furnace and turned
with boyish eagerness to have my father show me how.
Six hundred pounds was the weight of pig-iron we used to put
into a single hearth. Much wider than the hearth was the fire
grate, for we needed a heat that was intense. The flame was made
by burning bituminous coal. Vigorously I stoked that fire for
thirty minutes with dampers open and the draft roaring while that
pig-iron melted down like ice-cream under an electric fan. You
have seen a housewife sweating over her oven to get it hot enough
to bake a batch of biscuits. Her face gets pink and a drop of
sweat dampens her curls. Quite a horrid job she finds it. But I
had iron biscuits to bake; my forge fire must be hot as a
volcano. There were five bakings every day and this meant the
shoveling in of nearly two tons of coal. In summer I was stripped
to the waist and panting while the sweat poured down across my