And as I
saw the white-hot sheets of iron issuing from those crunching rollers,
driven by the power of seven thousand horses, I felt that the youth with
the stamping iron should have put a fleur-de-lis upon each with all his
other cabalistic markings, for who of us can know that any metal would
ever have flowed white from the furnaces in that valley if the white-metal
signs of Louis XV had not first been carried into it?
In each of these halls there pass in orderly succession cars with varied
cargoes; red ore from the faraway hills beyond Superior, limestone
fragments from some near-by hill, and scrap of earlier burning. These, one
by one, are seized by a great arm of iron, thrust out from a huge moving
structure that looks like a battering-ram and is operated by a young man
about whom the lightnings play as he moves; and, one by one, they are cast
into the furnaces that are heated to a temperature of a thousand degrees
or more. There the red earth is freed of its "devils," as the great
ironmaster has named the sulphur and phosphorus--freed of its devils as
the red child was freed of his sins by the touch of holy water from the
fingers of Allouez out in those very forests from which the red ore was
dug--and comes forth purified, to be cast into flaming ingots, to be again
heated and then crushed and moulded and sawed and pierced for the better
service of man.
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