Insulation is a wide range business. It cases wire in asbestos to prevent fire from stopping its work; but perhaps the highest phase is reached in the great cables of copper wires used in telephone service. For these the individual wires are covered with paper of various colors, which serves not only for protection but enables men at the opposite ends of a long cable to pick out unerringly the wires with which connection is to be made. Colors are few but possible combinations are many. The machining of this is more than ever like the Maypole, with pink and blue and yellow strips of paper flashing in the shadows. When the wires, paper covered, are brought together in the cable, sometimes three or four hundred of them altogether, the whole goes through the taping machines, which apply one or two suits of what may be called "underwear," for after it has been covered with two or three different materials there remains a suit of lead to be fitted, and this is a big work done deftly. Who has not seen men in the streets dragging huge pipes of lead through the open manholes from big wooden spools? These are the cables you talk over. They have been papered and clothed--and tarred and feathered, maybe--and then encased in lead by a process that is so easy as to be laughable, and yet as ingenious as any one thing the wire miller does. Unrolling slowly from its spool, the heavy cable moves up to a machine built strong and four-legged from the floor. In the mid height of this, a few feet above the floor, is a square chamber containing molten lead. The cable passes in at the rear and upward. It requires some credulity to believe that it is the movement of the molten lead that carries the cable along, but in any case when it emerges from the "box," through an aperture that trims the soft metal down to uniformity, it has a solid lead covering as even as lead pipe, and at the point of egress cold water playing from just above cools it. Then it passes on through a long tank of water for final hardening and is wound slowly, clean and shining, on the great spools that are to carry it to market. Many astonishing things are done in wire works, but done so swiftly, and smoothly and in such volume that they look easy. The man in the street, hurrying about his own business, never even takes time to wonder to himself how they are accomplished. CHAPTER V WIRE ROPE--THE GIANT "Pig" and "ore" and melting materials, with a condiment of carbon, are the body and bones of steel wire. Their virtues, combined and intensified by tireless processes, and tested unsparingly at every stage, are united in wire rope; and wire rope, when all is said and done, is the mighty backbone of the wire industry.