On Monday morning I followed the cindered road inside the gate for three hundred yards, turned off across a railroad track, and passed a machine-shop. The concrete bases of the blast-furnaces rose before me. Somebody had just turned a wheel on the side of one of the boiler-like "stoves," and a deafening blare, like tons of steam getting away, broke on my eardrums. I asked where the office was. "Through there." Up some steps, over a concrete platform, past the blaring "stove," I went, to the other side of the furnaces, and found there a flat dirty building--the office. Inside was Mr. Beck, who turned me over at once to Adolph, the "stove-gang boss." I was a little anxious over this introduction to things, and thought it might embarrass or prevent comradeships. But it didn't. No one knew, or if he did, ever gave it a thought. It may perhaps have accounted for Adolph's letting me keep my clothes in his shanty that night, and for considerable conversation he vouchsafed me on the first day. But my individuality passed quickly, very quickly; I became no more than a part of that rather dingy unit, the stove-gang. While I was putting on my clothes in Adolph's sheet-iron shanty, he grinned and said: "Last time, pretty dirty job, too, eh?" "Yes," I said, "open-hearth." He led me out of the shanty, past three stoves, up an iron staircase, past a blast-furnace, and through a "cast-house." That is not as interesting as I hoped. It is merely a place of many ditches, or run-ways, that lead the molten iron from the furnace to the ladle. Very little iron is ever "cast," since the blast-furnaces here make iron only for the sake of swiftly transporting it, while still hot, to the Bessemer and open-hearth, for further metamorphosis into steel. We came at last to more stoves, a set of three for No. 4 blast-furnace. Near the middle one was a little group of seven men, three of them with a bar, which they thrust and withdrew constantly in an open door of the stove. Inside were shelving masses and gobs of glowing cinder. "You work with these feller," Adolph said; and passed out of sight along the stoves. I watched carefully for a long time, which was a cardinal rule of practice with me on joining up with a new gang. It was best, I thought, to shut up, and study for a spell the characters of the men, the movements and knacks of the job. I think this reserve helped, for the men were first to make advances, and before the day was out, I had a life-history from most of them. "Where you work, las' job?" asked a little Italian with a thin blond moustache, after he had finished his turn on the crowbar. "Open-hearth," I said, "third-helper." "I work three week open-hearth," he said, "too hot, no good." "Hot all right," I said; "how's this job?" "Oh, pretty good, this not'ing," he said; "sometime we go in stove, clean 'em up, hot in there like hell. Some day all right, some day no good."