“I will bring you together after working-hours some day,” whispered Mr. Wallace to her. “If we should meet him taking his ramble on a Sunday, or when, as now and then happens, we put somebody in his place to relieve him for a day, he will be more disposed for conversation than now. He is sociable enough when he falls in with any one whom he thinks worthy of being talked to.” “I am afraid we shall be quite looked down upon by such a high and mighty personage,” said Mrs. Sydney, laughing. But Mr. Wallace promised to draw him out. The party then proceeded to the refinery where the pig-iron is refined, and to the forge and mill where it is formed into bars. They saw the _refiners_ take it by turns to run out their moulds of metal; and the _weigher_ who examines their work and keeps an account of it; and the _puddler_ at the forge who improves the quality of the metal by another refining process; and the _shingler_ who hammers the balls of metal into an oblong form for going through the roll; and the _roller_ and his _catcher_ who stand on each side of the rolling machine, and put the bar into a smaller roll every time it is handed from one to the other; and the _straighteners_ who straighten the bars while they are hot, and mark them with the stamp of the works where they are made; and the _bar-weighers_ who examine the finished work; and the clerks or superintendents who conduct the whole. The youths were as much struck as the ladies with the grandeur of the scale on which the manufacture was carried on, and with the ingenuity of the contrivances for aiding and saving labour. “What a sum of money must have been laid out here!” cried Francis. “And what a quantity of labour that money has brought into operation!” observed Mrs. Sydney. “Yes, but there is nothing so very remarkable in seeing eleven hundred people at work, as in observing what comes of such an outlay of capital.” “It was not merely the labour of eleven hundred pairs of hands that I was speaking of,” replied Mrs. Sydney, “but of the hoarded labour which does what no unassisted human hands could do; the shears and the rollers, and all the complicated machinery which enables us to treat iron as it were wood or clay. I suppose, Mr. Wallace, you are free from complaints about the use of machinery; as your works are of a kind which cannot be done by hand?”