together as a scroll." There is a clang and clatter accompanying a
marvelous order. There are clouds of steam. There are displays of sparks
and glow surpassing all the pyrotechnics of art. Monstrous throats gasp
for a draught of white-hot metal and take it at a gulp. Glowing masses
are trundled to and fro. There are mountains of ore, disappearing in a
night, and ever renewed. There is a railway system, and the huge masses
are conveyed from place to place by locomotive engines. There is a water
system that would supply a town. There may be miles of underground pipes
bringing gas for fuel. Amid these scenes flit strong men, naked to the
waist, unharmed in the red pandemonium, guiding every process,
superintending every result; like other men, yet leading a life so
strange that it is apparently impossible. The glowing rivers they
escape; corruscating showers of flying white-hot metal do not fall upon
them; the leaping, roaring, hungry, annihilating flames do not touch
them; the gurgling streams of melted steel are their familiar
playthings; yet they are but men.

The "rolling" of these slabs and ingots into rails is a following
operation still. The continuous rail is often more than a hundred feet
in length, which is cut into three or four rails of thirty feet each,
and it goes through every operation that makes it a "T" rail weighing
ninety pounds to the yard with the single first heat. There are trains
of rolls that will take in a piece of white-hot metal weighing six tons,
and send it out in a long sheet three thirty-seconds of an inch thick
and nearly ten feet wide. The first steel rails made in this country
were made by the Chicago Rolling Mill Company, in May, 1865. Only six
rails were then made, and these were laid in the tracks of the Chicago
and North Western Railroad. It is said they lasted over ten years. The
first nails, or tacks, were made of steel at Bridgewater, Mass., at
about the same date.