ladle full of tons of liquid metal that shimmered above its white-hot expanse with the shifting blue flames of escaping gas. Seething and bubbling, the molten iron slopped in a flashing film over the side of the caldron, every drop, as it struck the black earth, rebounding in a thousand exploding points of fire. Above the swaying ladle, far up in the glooms under the roof, the shadows were pierced by the lurching dazzle of arc-lamps; but when the ladle tipped, and with a crackling roar the stream of metal flowed into a mould, the sizzling violet gleam of the lamps was abruptly extinguished by the intolerable glare of light.

"Oh," Blair said breathlessly, "how wonderful! "

"It is wonderful," his mother said. "Thomas, here, can move the lever that tips the ladle with his two fingers and out comes the iron as neatly as cream out of a jug!

Blair was so entirely absorbed in the fierce magnificence of light, and in the glowing torsos of the moulders, planted as they were against the profound shadows of the foundry, that when she said, "Come on!" he did not hear her. Mrs. Maitland, standing with her hands on her hips, her feet well apart, held her head high; she was intensely gratified by his interest. "If his father had only lived to see him!" she said to herself. In her pride, she almost swaggered; she nodded, chuckling, to the moulder at her elbow:

"He takes to it like a duck to water, doesn't he, Jim? ""And,” said Jim, telling the story afterward, "I allowed I'd never seen a young feller as knowing about castings as him. She took it down. straight. You can't pile it on too thick for a woman about her young 'un."

"Somebody ought to paint it," Blair said, under his breath.

Mrs. Maitland's face glowed; she came and stood beside him a moment in silence, resting her big, dirty hand on his shoulder. Then she said, half sheepishly, "I call that ladle the cradle of civilization.' Think what's inside of it! There are rails, that will hold New York and San Francisco together, and engines and machines for the whole world; there are telegraph wires that will bring-think of all the kinds of news they will bring, Blair-wars, and births of babies! There are bridges in it, and pens that may write well, maybe love-letters," she said, with sly and clumsy humor, "or even write, perhaps, the liberty of a race, as Lincoln's pen wrote it. Yes!" she said, her face full of luminous abstraction," the cradle of civilization!"

He could hardly hear her voice in the giant tumult of exploding metal and the hammering and crashing in the adjacent mill; but when she said that, he looked round at her with the astonishment of one who sees a familiar face where he has supposed he would see a stranger. He forgot his shame in having a mother who ran an ironmill; a spark of sympathy leaped between them as real in its invisibility as the white glitter of the molten iron sputtering over their heads. Yes," he said, "it's all that, and it is magnificent, too! "

"Come on!" she said, with a proud look. Over her shoulder she flung back at him figures and statistics; she told him of the tons of bridge materials on the books; the rail contract she had just taken was a big thing, very big! "We've never handled such an order, but we can do it!

They were walking rapidly from the foundry to the furnaces; Sarah Maitland was inspecting piles of pig, talking to puddlers, all the while bending and twisting between her strong fingers, with their blackened nails, a curl of borings, perhaps biting on it, thoughtfully, while she considered some piece of work, then blowing the crumbs of iron out from between her lips and bursting into quick directions or fault-finding. She stood among her men, in her short skirt, her gray hair straggling out over her forehead from under her shabby bonnet, and gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she was self-conscious-Blair was looking on! listening! thinking, no doubt, that one of these days he would be doing just what she was doing!

When they got back to the office again she was very brief and business-like with him. She had had a fine morning, but she couldn't waste any more time! "You can keep all this that you have seen in your mind. I don't know just where I shall put you. If you have a preference, express it." Then she told him what his salary would be when he got to work, and what allowance he was to have for the present.

"Now, clear out, clear out!" she said; "good-by "; and turned her cheek toward him for their semi-annual parting. Blair, with his eyes shut, kissed her.

"Good-by, mother. It has been awfully interesting. And I am awfully obliged to you about the allowance." On the threshold of the office he halted. "Mother," he said—and his voice was generous even to wistfulness--"Mother, that cradle thing was stunning."

1

But Hugo helped no new-thoughter to belittle honest business. Unlike some I could mention, I've seen factories before," quoth he. "I've seen a million-dollar business done in a smaller plant than that."

Actually Cally found the Works bigger than she had expected; reaction from the childish marble palace idea had swung her mind's eye too far. But gazing at the weatherworn old pile, spilling dirtily over the broken sidewalk, she was once more struck and depressed by something almost sinister about it, something vaguely foreboding. To her imagination it was a little as if the ramshackle old pile leered at her: "Wash your hands of me if you will, young lady. I mean you harm some day. . .

But then, of course, she wasn't washing her hands of it; her hands had never been in it at all.

"You'll get intensely interested and want to stay hours!" said she, with the loud roar of traffic in her ears. Remember I only came for a peep-just to see what a Works is like inside."

Hugo, guiding her over the littered sidewalk to the shabby little door marked " Office," swore that she could not make her peep too brief for him.

She had considered the possibility of encountering her father here; had seen the difficulties of attributing this foray to Hugo's insatiable interest in commerce, with Hugo standing right there. However, in the very unpretentious offices inside-desolate places of common wood partitions, bare floors, and strange, tall stools and desks she was assurred by an anæmic youth with a red Adam's apple that her father had left for the bank an hour earlier, which was according to his usual habit. She inquired for Chas Cooney, who kept books from one of those lofty stools, but Chas was reported sick in bed. Accordingly the visitors fell into the hands of Mr.

MacQueen, whom Carlisle, in the years, had seen occasionally entering or leaving papa's study o' nights.

MacQueen was black, bullet-headed, and dour. He had held socialistic views in his fiery youth, but had changed his mind like the rest of us when he found himself rising in the world. In these days he received a percentage of the Works' profits, and cursed the impudence of Labor. As to visitors, his politics were that all such had better be at their several homes, and he indicated these opinions, with no particular subtlety, to Miss Heth and Mr. Canning. He even cited them a special reason against visiting to-day: new machines being installed, and the shop upset in consequence. However, he did not feel free to refuse the request outright, and when Canning grew a little sharp-for he did the talking, generously enough-the sour vizier yielded, though with no affectation of a good grace.

"Well, as ye like then.

This way."

And he opened a door with a briskness which indicated that Carlisle's expressed wish "just to look around" should be carried out in the most literal manner.

The opening of this door brought a surprise. Things were so unceremonious in the business district, it seemed, that you stepped from the superintendent's office right into the middle of everything, so to speak. You were inspecting your father's business a minute before you knew it.

Cally, of course, had had not the faintest idea what to expect at the Works. She had prepared herself to view horrors with calm and detachment, if such proved to be the iron law of busiBut, gazing confusedly at the dim, novel spectacle that so suddenly confronted her, she saw nothing of the kind. Her heart, which had been beating a little faster than usual, rose at once.

ness.

Technically speaking, which was the way Mr. MacQueen spoke, this was the receiving- and stemming-room. It was as big as a barn, the full size of the building, except for the end cut off to make the offices. Negroes worked here; negro men, mostly wearing red undershirts. They sat in long rows, with quick fingers stripping the stems from the not unfragrant leaves. These were stemmers, it was learned. Piles of the brown tobacco stood beside each stemmer, bales of it were stacked, ceiling-high, at the farther end of the room, awaiting their attentions. The negroes eyed the visitors respectfully. They

were heard to laugh and joke over their labors. If they knew of anything homicidal in their lot, certainly they bore it with a fine humorous courage.

Down the aisle between the black rows, Cally picked her way after Hugo and Mr. MacQueen. Considering that all this was her father's, she felt abashingly out of place, most intrusive; when she caught a dusky face turned upon her she hastily looked another way. Still, she felt within her an increasing sense of cheerfulness. Washington Street sensibilities were offended, naturally. The busy colored stemmers were scarcely inviting to the eye; the odor of the tobacco soon grew a little overpowering; there were dirt and dust and an excess of steam-heat-" Tobacco likes to be warm," said MacQueen. And yet the dainty visitor's chief impression, somehow, was of system and usefulness and order, of efficient and on the whole well-managed enterprise.

"If there's anything the matter here," thought she, "men will have to quarrel and decide about it. Just as I said."

The inspecting party went upward, and these heartening impressions were strengthened. On the second floor was another stemming-room, long and hot like the other; only here the stemming was done by machines-" for the fancy goods "-and the machines were operated by negro women. They were middle-aged women, many of them, industrious and quite placid-looking. Perhaps a quarter of the whole length of the room was prosaically filled with piled tobacco stored ready for the two floors of stemmers. The inspection here was brief, and to tell the truth, rather tame, like an anti-climax. Not a trace or a vestige of homicide was descried, not a blood-spot high or low.

Cally had been observing Hugo, who looked so resplendent against this workaday background, and felt herself at a disadvantage with him. He had not wanted to come at all, but now that they were here, he exhibited a far more intelligent interest in what he saw than she did or could. Oddly enough, he appeared to know a good deal about the making of cigars, and his pointed comments gradually elicited a new tone from MacQueen, who was by now talking to him almost as to an equal. Several times Cally detected his eyes upon her, not bored but openly quizzical.

"Learning exactly how a cheroot factory ought to be run?" he asked, sotto voce, as they left the second floor.