s the work of six women. Isn't it a
beauty?"

Bojo looked beyond it to the clustered groups of women by long counters
piled with steel parts, working rapidly at slow, intricate processes of
assembling.

"I suppose you'll get a machine some day to do all that too," he said.

"Sure. Wherever you see more than two at a job there's something to be
done. Look here." They stood by a couple of swarthy Polack women, who
were placing tiny plugs in grooves on round surfaces to be covered and
fastened with ball-bearing casters. "Looks pretty tough proposition to
get out of those fingers. We've worked two years at it, but we'll get
them yet. It's the slug shape that makes it hard; the simple
ball-bearings were a cinch. Here's how we worked that out."

A machine was under Bojo's eyes that caught the open roller and plunged
it into a circular arena, where from six converging gates steel balls
were released and fell instantly into place, a fraction of a second
before the upper cover, descending, was fixed and hammered down.

"One hundred and fifty a minute against thirty to forty, and two
operations made into one."

"But you can't do the same thing with an irregular slug," said Bojo,
amazed.

"There's a way somehow," said Garnett, smiling at the tribute of his
astonishment. "If you want to see what a machine can do, look at this,
the pride of the shop."

"Who's watching it?" said Bojo, surprised to see no one in attendance.

"Not a soul. It's a wise old machine. All we do is to fill up the hamper
once an hour, and it goes ahead, feeds itself, juggles a bit, hammers on
a head, and fills up its can, two hundred a minute."

In a large feeding-box, a tangled mass of small steel pins, banded at
one end, were rising and falling, settling and readjusting themselves. A
thin grooved plate rose and fell into the mass, sucking into its groove,
or catching in its upward progress, from one to six of the pins, which,
perpendicularly arranged, slid down to a new crisis. Steel fingers
caught each pin as released, threw it with a half turn into another
groove, where it was again passed forward and fixed in shape for the
crushing hammer blow that was to flatten the head. A safety-device based
on exact tension stopped the machine instantly in case of accident.

"Suffering Moses, is it possible!" said Bojo, staring like a schoolboy.
"Never saw anything like it."

"Gives you an idea what can be done, doesn't it?"

"It does!"

Then he beg