was a lonesome looking place till you
got used to it, in spite of the thousands of men who swarmed around
them. The queer, raw smell of the reddish iron ore added to the feeling,
too.

Away down in the big ore boats along the docks, gangs of big, brawny
workmen strained and sweated, filling the iron buckets that traveled up
the wire cables to the ore dumps. Others were trucking the ore to the
furnaces, while a swarm of little switch engines panted and puffed back
and forth over the network of steel rails.

The steel works covered many acres of ground, and, shut off as they were
by high fences, seemed almost like another world. The roar of the
furnaces and the din of steel on steel made Betty and the boys feel
rather confused at first. "I should think all these men just over from
the old country would get mixed up, so many of them not understanding a
single word of English," said Betty to their guide.

"Yes, we have to be mighty careful," said the man, who was one of the
Safety men who gave all his time to making the steel mills safer for the
thousands of workmen. "We print this little book of Safety Rules in all
the different languages, so that each new man can study it and find out
how to do his day's work without getting into danger."

"Wow! what's that?" Joe's black eyes opened very wide as he pointed to a
great ball of fire that rose from one of the furnace stacks, floated a
little way like a balloon, and then burst into a sheet of flame.

"Just the gas from the blast furnace--regular Fourth of July fireworks,
isn't it? I remember how queer those gas bubbles used to look to me when
I first came to work here."

He waited while his visitors stared for a few minutes at the fiery
clouds, then led the way to the blast furnaces. They went through two or
three big buildings, all of them fairly alive with hurrying, sweating
laborers. But in spite of the seeming confusion all around them, Bob
noticed how carefully the aisles and passageways were kept free and
clear of anything the hurrying men might stumble over.

"We simply have to do it," explained the steel man. "Before we woke up
to the importance of never leaving anything in the way where it might be
stumbled over, we had more broken arms and legs every month than you
could shake a stick at. Now it's different; it's as much as a man's job
is worth to leave anything lying in the passageways for his fellow
workmen to stumble and fall over."

"I saw some white lin