"No drink?" I asked, wondering if I had found a Puritan. "Oh, _drink_" he said with profound emphasis; and continuing, he told me of other solaces he found in this mortal life. "Look!" cried some one. Herb, the craneman, in a fit of extreme playfulness had thrown some wet green paint forty feet through the air at the pit boss, greening the whole side of his face. Al was doing a long backward dodge, and slapping a hand to his painted face, supposing it a draught of hot metal. When he perceived that he wasn't killed, he picked up cinder-hunks and bombarded the crane-box. It sounded like hail on tin. Pete, the Russian melter, came out on the gallery behind the furnaces, and I could see by the way he looked the pit over, that he was picking a man for furnace work. Somebody had stayed out and they were short a helper. He looked at the fat workman beside me, and then grunted. This was the third time he had picked Russians in preference to the rest of us, who are Serbian, Austrian, and American. The next day I went on the floor, and tackled Pete. "How about a chance on the floor?" I said, standing in front of him to keep him from lurching away. "Y' get chance 'nuff, don' worry." "If I can't get a crack at learning this game in Bouton, I'll go somewhere I can," I said, boiling up a little. Dick Reber, the Pennsylvania-Dutch melter, came up. "I want a chance on the floor," I said. "All right, boy, go on Number 7 to-day." I made all speed to Number 7. "Is he doing that," I thought, as I picked up my shovel, "because I'm an American?" I looked up and saw the big ladle-bucket pouring hot metal into a spout in the furnace-door, accompanied by a great swirl of sparks and flame, spurting upward with a sizzle. "At last," I said, "I'm going to make steel." The steel starts in as "scrap" in the mill-yard. Scrap from anywhere in America; a broken casting, the size of a man's trunk, down to corroded pipe, or strips the thickness of your nail, salvaged in bales. The overhead crane gathers them all from arriving flat cars by a magnet as big as a cart wheel, and the pieces of steel leap to meet it with apparent joy, stick stoutly for a moment, and fall released into iron charge-boxes. By trainloads they pass out of the stockyard and into the mill, where the track runs directly in front of the furnace-doors. There the charging-machine dumps them quickly into the belly of the furnace. It does its work with a single iron finger, about ten feet long and nearly a foot thick, lifting the box by a cleat on the end, and poking it swiftly into the flaming door. Old furnaces charged by hand hold from twenty-five to thirty-five tons; new ones, up to two hundred and fifty.