es
striving, like himself, to escape from old chains.

If he failed with Susan his existence would have been an unmitigated
evil; the iron, his petty, material triumphs, would rust, but the other
go on and on. His thoughts became a maze of pity for Eunice, infinite
regret of the past, a bitter energy of hope for what might follow.

He turned with pride to his forging--long-wrought charcoal iron; the
world would know no better. Still, with his penetration of the future,
he realized that the old, careful processes were doomed. He had
difficulty in assembling enough adequate workmen to fill the increasing
contracts for bar iron and rails now; and the demand, with the extension
of steam railways, would grow resistlessly. More wholesale methods of
production were being utilized daily; he was one of the foremost
adherents of "improvement"; but suddenly he felt a poignant regret at
the inevitable passing of the old order of great Ironmasters, the
principalities of furnaces and forges. He was still, he felt, such a
master of his men and miles of forests and clearings, lime pits and ore
banks, coal holes, mills, coke ovens, hearths and manufactories. He
might still drive to Virginia through a continuous line of his
interests; his domination over his labourers, in all their personal and
industrial implications, was patriarchal; he commanded, through their
allegiance and his entire grasp on every iota of their living, their
day's journey; but, he told himself, he was practically the last of his
kind.

New and different industrial combinations were locking together in great
agglomerations of widely-separated activities; the human was superseded
by the industrial machine, where men were efficient, subservient cogs in
a cold and successful automaton of business. A system of general credit
was springing up; the old, old payments in kind, in iron or even meal
and apparel, or gold, had given place to reciprocal understandings of
deferred indebtedness. The actual thousands of earlier commerce were
replaced by theoretical millions. His own realty, his personal property,
because of such understandings, were outside computation. They were, he
knew, reckoned in surprising figures; but in a wide-spread panic, forced
liquidation, the greater part of his wealth would break like straw. It
was the same with the entire country.

His thoughts returned to Susan, to the longing for the peace, the
inviolable security, she would bring to the centre