e caissons of this bridge, three died of
paralysis, and of course a number of others had slight attacks of the
"bends," in one form or another.

The bridge, when we visited it, was more than half completed. On the
Memphis side the approaches were almost ready, and the steel framework
of the bridge reached from the shore across the front pier, and was
being built out far beyond the pier, on the cantilever principle,
hanging in the air above the middle of the stream. By walking out on the
old bridge we could survey the extreme end of the new one, which was
being extended farther and farther, daily, by the addition of new steel
sections. There were then about 100 journeymen bridgemen on the
work--these being workmen of the class that erects steel skyscraper
frames--with some fifty apprentices and carpenters, and about twenty
common laborers. Bridgemen are among the highest paid of all workmen. In
New York, at that time, their wage was $6 for eight hours' work. Here it
was $4.50. Very few of the men had families with them in Memphis. They
are the soldiers of fortune among wage-earners, a wild, reckless, fine
looking lot of fellows, with good complexions like those of men in
training, and eyes like the eyes of aviators. No class of men in the
world, I suppose, have steadier nerves, think quicker, or react more
rapidly from stimulus to action, whether through sight or sound. They
have to be like that. For where other workmen pay for a mistake by loss
of a job, these men pay with life. Yet they will tell you that their
work is not dangerous. It is "just as safe as any other kind of
job"--that, although four of their number had already been lost from
this bridge alone. One went off the end of the structure with a derrick,
the boom of which he lowered before the anchor-bolts had been placed.
Two others fell. A fourth was struck by a falling timber.

Once, while we were watching the men scrambling about upon the steel
members of the uncompleted cantilever arm, one of them thought something
was about to fall, and ran swiftly in, over a steel beam, toward the
body of the structure; whereafter, as nothing did fall, he was
unmercifully twitted by his fellow workers for having shown timidity.

Many of the men working on this bridge had worked on the older structure
paralleling it. This was true not only of the laboring men, but of the
engineers. Ralph Modjeski, the consulting engineer at the head of the
work (he is, by the way, a so