feet long, two hundred and fifty feet wide, making an area of
fifteen and a half acres, and capable of accommodating ten of the
largest steamships entering the canal.

Thus this great city, at a cost of fifteen million pounds, opened its
gateway to the ocean, and receives at its doors rich freights of
merchandise from all quarters of the earth, though it stands thirty-five
miles away from the sound of the sea.

[Illustration: Iron-smelting in India.]

IRON-SMELTING IN INDIA.

In many parts of India iron is made in a very simple way, which has
probably been followed for centuries without much change. The
iron-worker builds a little furnace of clay, in the form of a tower
which is narrower at the top than at the bottom. This tower is only four
or five feet high, so that it is after all no bigger than the towers and
castles which children build in the sand; but its builder makes good use
of it, small though it is. The top of it is open, and at the bottom
there are one or two openings in the side, through which the iron-maker
can blow the air of a pair of bellows. These bellows are goat-skin bags,
which have been made by sewing up whole skins. A hollow bamboo is fitted
into the end of each bag, in order to form the pipes of the bellows and
there is also another opening in each bag which may be closed very
quickly by the man who blows the bellows. He works the bellows by
pressing upon the goat-skin bags with his feet, so as to drive out the
air through the pipe which is fixed in the end of each bag. He works two
bags at one time, pressing first upon one and then upon the other. While
he is pressing one bag, he raises the other, which is empty, and allows
it to fill again through the hole which has been left in it for that
purpose. In this way he contrives to have one bag filling with air,
while he is squeezing the air out of the other.

The smelter, before he can make iron, must have iron ore and fuel, as
well as furnace and bellows. The ore he has already dug from the ground
and arranged in a little heap near his furnace. It is usually a rather
dark-coloured stone, or a soft, red earth. The fuel is charcoal, which
the smelter makes by burning wood in a heap more or less covered with
earth, in such a way that the wood chars rather than burns away.

A very hot fire is needed to change the stony or earthy iron-ore into
iron, or rather to burn out the iron which lies in the ore, and the clay
furnace and the bellow