He led the way to some iron stairs, and we went down together into that darkened region under the furnaces, about whose function I had speculated. To the left I could make out tracks. Railroads seem to run through a steel mill from cellar to attic. And at intervals, from above the tracks, torrents of sparks swept into the dark, with now and then a small stream of yellow fire. We stumbled over bricks, mud, clay, a shovel, and the railroad track. In front of a narrow curtain of molten slag, falling on the floor, we waited for some moments. We were under the middle furnaces, I calculated. Gradually the curtain ceased, and Pete leaped under the hole from which it had come. "Watch yourself," he said. I followed him with a broad jump, and a prayer about the falling slag. We came out into the pit, which had so many bright centres of molten steel that it was lighter than outdoors. I watched Pete's back chiefly, and my own feet. We kept stepping between little chunks of dark slag, which made your feet hot, and close to a bucket, ten feet high, which gave forth smoke. Wheelbarrows we met, with and without men, and metal boxes, as large as wagons, dropped about a dirt floor. We avoided a hole with a fire at its centre. At last, at the edge of the pit, near more tracks, we ran into the pit gang: eight or ten men, leaning on shovels and forks and blinking at the molten metal falling into a huge bucket-like ladle. "Y' work _here_," said Pete, and moved on. I remember feeling a half-pleasurable glow as I looked about the strenuous environment, of which I was to become a part--a glow mixed with a touch of anxiety as to what I was up against for the next fourteen hours. Two of the eight men looked at me, and grinned. I grinned back and put on my gloves. "No. 6 furnace?" I asked, nodding toward the stream. "Ye-ah," said the man next me. He was a cleanly built person, in loose corduroy pants, blue shirt open at his neck. Italian. He grinned with extraordinary friendliness, and said, "First night, this place?" "Yes," I returned. "Goddam hell of a ---- job," he said, very genially. We both turned to look at the stream again. For ten minutes we stood and stared. Two men lit cigarettes, and sat on a wheelbarrow; four of the others had nodded to me; the other three stared. I was eager to organize into reasonableness a little of this strenuous process that was going forward with a hiss and a roar about me. "That's the ladle?" I said, to start things. "Ye-ah, w'ere yer see metal come, dat's spout, crane tak' him over pour platform, see; pour man mak li'l hole in ladle, fill up moul'--see de moul' on de flat cars?"