=The Steel Factory or Rolling-mill.= One of the foremost pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a picture of a steel-mill. It seems to be a prosaic subject but it makes an appealing picture, and one typical of our modern world. Some one has described a steel-mill as a modern materialization of Dante’s Inferno. The sky above Pittsburgh, Birmingham, and other steel centers is aflame at night as the process of manufacturing is carried on in the miles of buildings that contain the workers and the machinery. To step into one of these steel factories even in broad daylight is to step out of the world of reality into the semi-reality of a new and unknown world. Most of the men work stripped to the waist. The long ribbons of red hot steel writhe and twist about the length of the room. The jangle of chains mingles with the creaking of the machinery above our heads. The sparks are flying and a bluish haze hovers about the heads of the men like some unholy halo as they move back and forth appearing as gnomes in the unnatural light of the place. There is a peculiar odor that we instinctively associate with the blacksmith shop that used to stand at the side of the street on the way between our house and the butcher shop where we used to be sent every day for the meat for dinner. Everything moves with feverish haste. No one lags. Every man knows his task and does it. He must keep up. The days are unusually long in the steel-mills. It used to be that the men worked twelve hours a day and seven days a week. This has been changed now in most of the mills, but even yet there is a great deal of twelve-hour work and a great deal of Sunday labor. The rumble of the cranes above the heads of the gnome-like men at work in the building fills our ears with an unearthly sound. The peculiar glare of the gigantic open hearth changes at frequent intervals as the white cascade of molten metal announces the beginning of the shaping process of the new rail or the new plate for some new man-of-war, or the beam that is to live for centuries in some skyscraper. These men working in this mill are kneading the metal into shape, for as it goes under the rollers it is pressed and twisted until the final process is completed.