To the novice they look like wire; to the _cognoscenti_ they are only rods, and in order to be wire some day are hustled off to the cleaning house and in bunches plunged into a bath of acid. This takes off the scale the rolling left on them. But acid in wire steel is like heresy in the church. It has to be purged away. This is done by immersion and then by a coating of lime to neutralize by chemical action whatever taint may remain. The steel is then baked from twenty-four to forty-eight hours to remove the hydrogen. Wire making has just begun. From this time on it is a wonder-work to the novice, a mechanical sleight of hand performance by which hundreds of shadowy men and other hundreds of whirling wheels spin the rod down ever smaller and smaller till what was once a stodgy four foot billet is perhaps a thousandth of an inch thick, fifteen odd thousand miles long, weighs less than a quarter of an ounce to the mile, and has to be looked for with your best reading glasses. It is just three times as fine as the hair on your head. [Sidenote: THE WORK OF THE WIRE DOCTORS] Never think that the tall chimney of a manufacturing plant tells the story of all that goes on in its shadow. It isn't all coarse work. If you could see the things that are done to a block of steel, and the brains that are mixed with it, in the Roebling plant, before it comes out and goes on its way, they would make you take off your hat to a piece of wire for the rest of your natural life. But it isn't all, what happens to the outside. There are wire doctors who follow the changing symptoms of the metal through its many processes, with diagnostic eye as keen as any medico's for traces of typhoid or mumps. Through all the process there are reheatings and coolings, at carefully specified temperatures, to give temper and then to take it away, to keep the ductility without sacrificing endurance. It is one business where you simply have to eat the cake and keep it, too. There is wet drawn wire and dry drawn wire, and chemical reasons for drawing wire wet, and divers ways of drying wet wire to attain certain conditions; there is lubrication by means of dry materials as well as oil, and soap suds, funny things that also act on the material itself in mysterious ways. But this is no text book. [Illustration: TRAMWAY RUNNING ON WIRE ROPE CABLE DUMPING COAL AT MINE]