ill faster within that gloomy,
smoke-blackened hollow. The workmen, with long iron rods in their hands,
moved about with the cautious, expectant manner of men whose duty brings
them in contact with a daily danger. They stepped carefully about,
fearful of injuring the regular impressions in the smooth sand, and
their looks turned ever with a certain anxiety to the great black
furnace at the northern end of the room, where every now and then, at
the foreman's order, a fiery eye would open itself for inspection and
close sullenly, making everything seem more dark than it was before. At
last--sometimes it was long to wait--the eye would open, and the
foreman, looking into it, would nod; and then a thrill of excitement ran
through the workmen at their stations and the boys in the big doorway;
and suddenly a huge red mouth opened beneath the eye, and out poured the
mighty flood of molten iron, glowing with a terrible, wonderful,
dazzling color that was neither white nor red, nor rose nor yellow, but
that seemed to partake of them all, and yet to be strangely different
from any hue that men can classify or name. Down it flowed upon the
sanded floor, first into the broad trench in front of the furnace, then
down the long dorsals of the rectangular herring-bones, spreading out as
it went into the depressions to right and left, until the mighty pattern
of fire shone in its full length and breadth on the flood of sand; and
the workmen, who had been coaxing the sluggish, lava-like flood along
with their iron rods, rested from their labors and wiped their hot
brows, while a thin cloud of steamy vapor floated up to the begrimed
rafters. Standing in the doorway we could watch the familiar
pattern--the sow and pigs, it was called--die down to a dull rose red,
and then we would hurry away before blackness came upon it and wiped it
clean out of memory and imagination.

Below the foundry, too, there was a point of land whereon were certain
elevations and depressions of turf-covered earth that were by many, and
most certainly by me, supposed to be the ruins of a Revolutionary fort.
I have heard long and warm discussions of the nature and history of
these mounds and trenches, and I believe the weight of authority was
against the theory that they were earthworks thrown up to oppose the
passage of a British fleet. But they were good enough earthworks for a
boy.

Just above Tiemann's, on the lofty, protrudent corner made by the
dropping of t