“I should like to know,” said Mrs. Wallace, “what is it that shocks you so much in our doings below.” She could not have made a more welcome inquiry. Armstrong was eloquent upon the inelegance of smoke, and rows of houses, and ridges of cinders, and all the appearances which attend an iron-work, and appealed to his guest as a lady of taste, whether such a laying waste of the works of nature was not melancholy. Mrs. Wallace could not agree that it was. It was true that a grove was a finer object at this distance than a cinder-ridge, and that a mountain-stream was more picturesque than a column of smoke; but there was beauty of a different kind which belonged to such establishments, and to which she was sure Mr. Armstrong would not be blind if he would only come down and survey the works. There was in the first place the beauty of the machinery. She thought it could not but gratify the taste to see how men bring the powers of nature under their own control by their own contrivances; how the wind and the fire are made to act in the furnace so that the metal runs out in a pure stream below; how, by the application of steam, such a substance as iron is passed between rollers, and compressed and shaped by them as easily as if it were potter’s clay, and then cut into lengths like twigs. Armstrong shook his head, and said this was all too artificial for him; and that granting (as he did not deny) that nature worked as much as man in these processes, she worked in another way which was not so beneficial,—in men’s hearts, making them avaricious, deceitful, and envious. “I was going to say,” replied Mrs. Wallace, “that there is another sort of beauty in such establishments, which I prefer to that I was speaking of. I know nothing more beautiful than to see a number of people fully employed, and earning comforts for themselves and each other. If people obtain their money as they want it, they are less likely to be avaricious than if it came to them without exertion on their part; because the energy which they give to the pursuit in the one case is likely to fix itself upon its rewards in the other. I do not know of any particular temptation to deceit or envy where all have their appointed labour and a sufficient reward without interfering with one another.” “I have seen enough of the tricks of trade,” said the old man. “You have been unfortunate, as I have understood,” said Mr. Wallace; “but it does not follow that there is knavery wherever there is social industry, any more than that every one has such a pretty place as this to retire to in case of disgust with the world. But as I was going to add to my wife’s description, there appears to me not less beauty in the mechanism of society than in the inventions of art.” “That is you being a master, like to survey the ranks of slaves under you.”