Passing the great piles of pig-iron and the greater heaps of coal, we enter the foundries. Upon yonder high platform two men are throwing great lumps of coal into the blazing, roaring mouth of a fiery furnace; and presently they stop throwing in coal, and begin to pitch in heavy bars of pig-iron, while the furnace hisses aloud with its fervent heat till it reminds us of Nebuchadnezzar’s. At the foot of this furnace or “cupola” two or three men are catching the molten iron in a huge pot on wheels which, when full, is drawn to another part of the foundry, and there another lot of men surround it, their hand ladles are poured full, and away they hurry with their hot and heavy burden to fill the long rows of moulds which cover the floor. Four such cupolas are breathing out great blasts of fire at their tops, and running streams of fiery liquid iron at their bases. Three of them have a capacity for melting eight tons of iron each per hour, and the other converts six tons of pig-iron into liquid each hour. The morning hours are occupied by the moulders in making moulds in sand of the various parts to be cast; and for about two hours in the afternoon the cupolas send out their sparkling streams, and the men fill the moulds with molten iron. When sufficiently cooled, the moulds of sand are knocked to pieces and the iron taken out and thrown into piles about the floor, while the sand is shoveled up and moistened for another day’s moulding. Four hundred men are employed in this immense foundry, which melts up sixty-five tons of iron every day in the week. The ground floor of the foundry has an area of over _two acres_. Imagine a two-acre field filled every day with iron castings of Singer sewing machines! And this is only a part of the iron work composing the machine. Much of the machine is composed of steel and wrought iron, which starts on its trip from the Forging Shop, instead of the Foundry. The portions cast in the foundry embrace the machine legs or “stands,” the “arm” and “bed,” the balance-wheel, band-wheel and a few minor parts. These parts, after cooling and being removed from the moulds, are taken to the Rumbling Room, 50 feet wide and 200 feet long, and put into revolving barrels filled with small five-pointed cast iron stars, which tumble about the barrels among the castings for hours together, and by the constant friction wear off all the sand and roughness.