s, and the next thing he knew was
days later at the hospital, where somebody was bending over him saying:
"Will you please tell me about your sensations coming down?" "And there
was a newspaper reporter trying to interview me," said Zimmer, "which is
what you might call rushing things."

"Tell ye a fall that stirred us boys all right," said another man. "It
was in the big shaft at Niagara Falls. You know where they send
electricity all over the State. The shaft was a hundred and eighty feet
deep, and they used to lower us down in a boat swung from an iron cable.
Well, one day the drum slipped and let the whole business fall free with
five of us in the boat. We went clear down one hundred and seventy feet,
and the boat fell away under us just like that granite block of
Zimmer's, and there we were hanging fast to the corner chains and every
man of us expecting to die. But somehow the engineer got his brakes on
just as we were ten feet above bottom, and blamed if we didn't land
fairly easy without a man hurt. Just the same, we'd looked over our
lives pretty well in those few seconds."

After this came tragic memories from other men. One recalled the
terrible wreck of the Cornwall bridge over the St. Lawrence. Another the
disaster at Louisville, when two great iron spans, reaching a thousand
feet, went down into the Ohio, with false work, "traveler," and
sixty-five men, of whom only four escaped. "And one of the four, sir,
was on the "traveler," two hundred feet above the water, when she went
down. Never had a scratch."

So the talk ran on, and I came away with mingled feelings of wonder and
admiration and sadness. Here are men who leave their families every
morning with full knowledge that before nightfall disaster may smite
them, as they have seen it smite their comrades. Why, one asks, do they
keep to such a career? And if they believe, as apparently they do, that
bridge-men are fated to violent death, why do they not leave this work
and seek a safer calling?

I suppose the same reason holds them to the bridge that holds the diver
to his suit, the climber to his steeple, each one of us to his
particular path--it is so hard to find another. And then there is the
lash of pressing need, the home to keep, and no time for experiment. Yet
there are the hard facts always, that no insurance company will take a
risk upon these lives, that bridge contractors are not philanthropists
nor issuers of pensions, and that if a man fa