d his progressive desire for
preliminary experience in factories that were handling problems of
labor-saving along modern lines.

"Glad to meet you," said Garnett, gripping his hand. "Mr. Granning tells
me you want to see the whole scheme from the bottom up. It's not
playing football, Mr. Crocker."

"Hope not," said Bojo with a smile. "It's very good of you to give me an
opportunity."

"Don't know how you'll feel about it after a couple of weeks. I'll get
Davy--that's my son--to show you around. We're doing some things here
you'll be interested in. Mr. Dyer's just installed some very pretty
machines. Davy'll put you onto the ropes--he's just been through it.
That's a great plant of your father's--went through it last year.
Nothing finer in the country."

He found young Garnett a boy of twenty, just out of high-school, alert,
eager, and stocked with practical knowledge. The morning he spent in
exploration was a revelation. In his old prejudice against what he had
confusedly termed business he had always recoiled as before a leveling
process, stultifying to the imagination, a thing of mechanical movements
and disciplined drudgery. He found instead his imagination leaping
forward before the spectacle of each succeeding regiment of machines,
before the teeming of progress, of the constant advance toward the
harnessing of iron and steel things to the bidding of the human mind.

Cars were being switched at the sidings, unloading their cargoes of
coiled steel; other cars were receiving the completed article, product
of a score of intricate processes, stamped, turned, assembled, and
hammered together, plated, lacquered, burnished, and packed for
distribution. He had but a confused impression at first of these rooms
of tireless wheels, automatic feeders and monstrous weights that sliced
solid steel like paper. The noises deafened him: the sandy, grinding
whirl of the tumbling room, the colliding shock of the blanking
machines, the steel hiss of the burnishers--deafening voices that in the
ensuing months were to become articulate utterances to his informed
ears, songs of triumph, prophetic of a coming age.

In the burnishing-room grotesque human and inhuman arms reached down
from a central pipe to the poisonous gases of the miniature furnaces.

"Granning's idea," said young Garnett. "Carries off the fumes. This room
was a hell before. Now it's clean and safe as a garden. Here's a machine
the Governor's just installed--doe