igher possibilities with such marvelous
accuracy, such ethereal fineness of touch, that even mainsprings and
hairsprings are looked back upon as coarse, crude, and cheap. When his
work is done, he shows you a few of the minutely barbed instruments
used by dentists to draw out the finest branches of the dental nerves.
While a pound of gold, roughly speaking, is worth about two hundred and
fifty dollars, a pound of these slender, barbed filaments of steel, if
a pound could be collected, might be worth hundreds of times as much.

Other experts may still further refine the product, but it will be many
a day before the best will exhaust the possibilities of a metal that
can be subdivided until its particles will float in the air.

It sounds magical, but the magic is only that wrought by the
application of the homeliest virtues; by the training of the eye, the
hand, the perception; by painstaking care, by hard work, and by
determination and grit.

If a metal possessing only a few coarse material qualities is capable
of such marvelous increase in value, by mixing brains with its
molecules, who shall set bounds to the possibilities of the development
of a human being, that wonderful compound of physical, mental, moral,
and spiritual forces? Whereas, in the development of iron, a dozen
processes are possible, a thousand influences may be brought to bear
upon mind and character. While the iron is an inert mass acted upon by
external influences only, the human being is a bundle of forces, acting
and counteracting, yet all capable of control and direction by the
higher self, the real, dominating personality.

The difference in human attainment is due only slightly to the original
material. It is the ideal followed and unfolded, the effort made, the
processes of education and experience undergone that fuse, hammer, and
mold our life-bar into its ultimate development.

Life, everyday life, has counterparts of all the tortures the iron
undergoes, and through them it comes to its highest expression. The
blows of opposition, the struggles amid want and woe, the fiery trials
of disaster and bereavement, the crushings of iron circumstances, the
raspings of care and anxiety, the grinding of constant difficulties,
the rebuffs that chill enthusiasm, the weariness of years of dry,
dreary drudgery in education and discipline,--all these are necessary
to the man who would reach the highest success.

The iron, by this manipulation, is