rails;
after which they are sawed off, to the accompaniment of a spray of white
sparks, into rail lengths, and run outside to cool. And I may add that,
while there is more brilliant heat to be seen in many other departments
of the plant, there is no department in which the color is more
beautiful than in the piles of rails on the cooling beds--some of them
still red as they come from the rollers, others shading off to rose and
pink, and finally to their normal cold steel-gray.

Presently along comes a great electromagnet; from somewhere in the sky
it drops down and touches the rails; when it rises bunches of them rise
with it, and, after sailing through the air, are gently deposited upon
flat cars. Here, even after the current is shut off, some of them may
try to stick to the magnet, as though fearing to go forth into the
world. If so, it gives them a little shake, whereupon they let go, and
it travels back to get more rails and load them on the cars.

Iron ore, coal, and limestone, the three chief materials used in the
making of steel, are all found in the hills in the immediate vicinity of
Birmingham. I am told that there is no other place in the world where
the three exist so close together. That is an impressive fact, but one
grows so accustomed to impressive facts, while passing through this
plant, that one ceases to be impressed, becoming merely dazed.

If I were asked to mention one especially striking item out of all that
welter, I should think of many things--things having to do with
vastness, with gigantic movements and mutations, with Niagara-like
noises, with great bursts of flame suggesting fallen fragments from the
sun itself--but above all I think that I should speak of the apparent
absence of men.

There were some four thousand men in the plant, I believe, at the time
we were there, but excepting when a shift changed, and a great army
passed out through the gates, we never saw a crowd; indeed I hardly
think we saw a group of any size. Here and there two or three men would
be doing something--something which, probably, we did not understand; in
the window of a locomotive cab, or that of a traveling crane, we would
see a man; we kept passing men as we went along; and sometimes as we
looked from a high perch over the interior of one of the great sheds, we
would be vaguely conscious of men scattered about the place. But they
were very small and gray and inconspicuous dots upon the surface of
great things