transportation--the echo
of the whip cracking over the mules that drew the coaches across the
covered viaduct, the labouring stationary engine and their slow ascent
beyond. They saw, lining the river, a cemetery elevated starkly against
the sky; and followed a canal by a broken, black flood between snowy
banks.

Past a town with impressive residences and manufactories with low
spreading veils of smoke, they came on a confusion of canals and canal
boats, lock dams and bridges, mules and raffish crews with tanned faces
and brightly coloured jackets and boots. Again crossing the river and a
shallow, tranquil valley, the train brigade rolled into the main street
of Jaffa. It was a town of small brick dwellings, spaced in orderly
yards, echoing to the diminished clamour of the Penny Rolling Mills on
the outskirts. Beyond the walls, starkly red against the snow, the
blackened main street, the river was spotted with ice.

Edgar Speever's wife accepted Eunice with an immediate and unquestioning
capability, and Jasper Penny turned away with a momentary but immense
relief. In a few days, after the deed for the possession of the child
had been executed, he could place her more permanently. He walked out to
the miscellaneous group of buildings and cluttered yards that held his
inherited activity; and in the small single-roomed building of the main
office discussed with his superintendent the changes, improvements of
process, then under way. The old nail machines, propelled by the feet
and hands of an operator, and producing but one nail at a time, had been
replaced by a high power engine, self-heading machinery. The
superintendent complained of the pig from the new hot blast furnaces.
"Impure," he declared. "And this new stone coal firing, too, makes but
poor stuff. It'll never touch the old charcoal forging. Hammered bar's
at ninety, and I'm glad to get it then. The puddling furnaces will do
something with the grey pig; we have eight in blast now, turning out the
railroad and heavier bars. This year will see forty-five hundred tons of
iron worked, and close to four thousand kegs of nails."

Jasper Penny listened attentively; it was his intention soon to dispense
entirely with all the time-honoured methods of iron manufacture. Water
power, with its unequal flow, any large employment of charcoal, growing
increasingly expensive with the rapid diminishment of the forests, must
give place to the steam blast machine and anthracite. I