After being crushed and screened the ore is roasted. Hundreds of tons of it are piled upon beds of cord wood and the fine ore dust is spread over the top. A fire is started and burns day after day for a period of two months or more. This drives out fifteen or twenty per cent. of the sulphur, which rises in a smoke of a light yellow colour. The smoke is almost pure sulphur. It smells like burnt matches and it fills the air about the furnace to such an extent that the men use rubber nose caps to protect their lungs from the fumes. These caps are for all the world like the nipples on babies’ nursing bottles, save that they are as big as your fist, and each has a sponge inside it soaked with carbonate of ammonia. This counteracts the effect of the sulphur and makes it possible for the men to work. I had one of these nipples over my nose when I went through the works, but nevertheless my lungs became filled with sulphur. I coughed until the tears rolled down my cheeks, and as I did so I thought if some of our preachers could get such a taste of brimstone their word pictures of the lower regions would be more realistic. One might suppose that the miners would be injured by these sulphur fumes. They are, on the contrary, as healthy as any people in the world. The children have rosy cheeks and the men are more rugged in appearance than those about Pittsburgh, or Anaconda, Montana. Even after the roasting there is still about seven per cent. of sulphur left. Most of this is removed in the smelting, which reduces the ore to a crude metal known as matte. Matte is the form in which the nickel is sent to the refineries. Formerly most of the refining was done in the United States or Europe, but during the World War the International Nickel Company built a refinery at Port Colborne, Ontario, and most of the Sudbury ore is now refined there. A large quantity goes also to Huntington, West Virginia, for making what is known as monel metal, an alloy of nickel and copper that possesses great strength, does not corrode easily, and is impervious to electrical currents. It is used in hotel kitchen equipment, in dyeing and pickling vats, and in many kinds of electrical apparatus. The mineral deposits of Sudbury were discovered by the Canadian Pacific Railway, which was responsible also for the finding of silver at Cobalt. However, no attention was paid to the nickel in the ore, which for years was considered valuable only for the copper it contained. Part of the ore was sent to New Jersey for smelting and refining, and part to Wales. The reduction works at New Jersey looked upon the nickel as of no account and let it run off with the slag, while the Wales smelters paid only for the copper and kept the nickel as a private rake-off. Later the mine owners discovered that the nickel was far more valuable than the copper, and since then nickel has been the principal source of profit.