First we saw the furnace where the iron soil is poured in and becomes molten. It runs out in a great channel of liquid fire which pours itself into an iron tank. The clinker, which is lighter and remains on the surface, is stopped by a sieve and diverted into another channel; thus the two separate. There are seven miles of cold clinker where it has been thrown out, great banks of it on which a track line has been built. While we were there the aperture of the furnace got choked up so the stream of fire had stopped. We watched the men with huge long pokers that required three men to move, trying to open up the aperture. After a few minutes the poker that came out was so short that one man could handle it. This happened several times. There were magnificent Czecho-Slovaks and a colored man working together on this. Their clinging, soaking shirts revealed their young, strong, conditioned bodies. The sweat poured from them. They worked rhythmically and almost leisurely, as though this thing went on forever and therefore there was no hurry. They were like dramatic pantomime actors, they never spoke. The sound of the hissing, spitting, shrieking furnace drowned all human efforts of sound. Seldom had a furnace mouth remained choked as long as this one. I wondered why we waited so long for nothing to happen, but our guide, who knew what we were waiting for, did not attempt to draw us away. Meanwhile the men probed with their iron instruments, all in vain. To me it seemed like some gigantic creature shrieking and protesting that something was wrong. Suddenly, as we stood there, a great roar and hissing and vomiting, and the flow of orange liquid fire burst forth with a great rush. As the stream proceeded along its course fire-work stars rose up and danced in the air above it, stars that burst, fairy-like, and illusive, and almost insolently flippant. At night it must be very spectacular. But I had been refused admittance at night, and even as a day visitor I was told I was the first woman admitted in ten years----! We proceeded to follow the liquid through its other processes--though not all, for at the end of three hours we were not through. But my head was swimming with sounds and sights, it was as though one had spent half a day in Dante’s Inferno. Moreover my legs were as weary as my head, and though I had meant to be back at five, it was six when I walked through the William Penn Hotel! The attention I seemed to draw made me wonder whether in those few hours fame had overtaken me in the press, but when I reached my room and saw my black face in the glass, I understood the stir I had created in the elevator!