ower city, and the good modern houses, and the
lawns and trees and shrubbery and breezes, this Highlands region is
reminiscent of a similar residence district in Portland, Oregon--which
is to say that it is one of the most agreeable districts of the kind in
the United States.

Well up on the hillside, Highland Avenue winds a charming course between
pleasant homes, with here and there a little residence park branching
off to one side, and here and there a small municipal park occupying an
angle formed by a sharp turn in the driveway; and if you follow the
street far enough you will presently see the house of the Birmingham
Country Club, standing upon its green hilltop, amidst rolling, partly
wooded golf links, above the road.

Nor is the Country Club at the summit of this range of hills. Back of it
rise other roads, the most picturesque of them being Altamont Road,
which runs to the top of Red Mountain, reaching a height about
equivalent to that of the cornice line of Birmingham's tallest building.
The houses of this region are built on streets which, like some streets
of Portland, are terraced into the hillside, and the resident of an
upper block can almost look down the chimneys of his neighbors on the
block below. The view commanded from these mountain perches does not
suggest that the lower city runs up into the Highlands. It seems to be a
separate place, down in a distant valley, and the sense of its
remoteness is heightened by the thin veil of gray smoke which wafts from
the tall smokestacks of far-off iron furnaces, softening the serrated
outlines of the city and wrapping its tall buildings in the industrial
equivalent for autumn haze.

At night the scene from the Highlands is even more spectacular, for at
brief intervals the blowing of a converter in some distant steel plant
illuminates the heavens with a great hot glow, like that which rises and
falls about the crater of a volcano in eruption. Thus the city's vast
affairs are kept before it by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in
a pillar of fire. Iron and steel dominate Birmingham's mind, activities
and life. The very ground of Red Mountain is red because of the iron ore
that it contains, and those who reside upon the charming slopes of this
hill do not own their land in fee simple, but subject always to the
mineral rights of mining companies.

The only other industry of Birmingham which is to be compared, in
magnitude or efficiency, with the steel ind