Flaming balls of woolly iron are pulled from the oven doors, flung on a two-wheeled serving tray, and rushed sputtering and flamboyant to the hungry mouth of a machine, which rolls them upon its tongue and squeezes them in its jaw like a cow mulling over her cud.

The molten slag runs down red-hot from the jaws of this squeezer and makes a luminous rivulet on the floor like the water from the rubber rollers when a washer-woman wrings out the saturated clothes.

Squeezed dry of its luminous lava, the white-hot sponge is drawn with tongs to the waiting rollers--whirling anvils that beat it into the shape they will.

Everywhere are hurrying men, whirring flywheels, 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.