I knew there was no "solution." There was nothing so neat as that for this multiform condition. But an _adjustment_, a _working arrangement_ would be found out, somehow, by my generation. I expected to discover no specific--no formula with ribbons--after working at the bottom of the mill. I did expect to learn something of the practical technique of making steel, and alongside it,--despite, or perhaps because of, an outsider's fresh vision,--some sense of the forces getting ready at the bottom of things to make or break society. Both kinds of education were certainly up to my generation. The train jarred under its brakes, and began to slow down. "Good luck," I said to the salesman; "I hope you make it all right." "Good luck," he said. The train stopped and I found the Bouton station, small and neatly built, of a gray stone, with deeply overhanging roof and Gothicized windows. It seemed unrelated to the rest of the steel community. On the right, across tracks, loomed a dark gathering of stacks arising from irregular acres of sheet-iron roofs. Smoke-columns of various texture, some colored gold from an interior light, streaked the sky immediately above the mill stacks. The town spread itself along a valley and on the sides of encircling hills on my left. In the foreground was Main Street, with stores and restaurants and a fruit-seller. I went across the street to explore for breakfast. "Can I look at the job?" I asked. "Sure," he said, "you can look at the job." I walked out of the square, brick office of the open-hearth foreman, and lost my way in a maze of railroad tracks, trestles, and small brick shanties, at last pushing inside a blackened sheet-iron shell, the mill. I entered by the side, following fierce white lights shining from the half-twilight interior. They seemed immensely brighter than the warm sun in the heavens. I was first conscious of the blaring mouths of furnaces. There were five of them, and men with shovels in line, marching within a yard, hurling a white gravel down red throats. Two of the men were stripped, and their backs were shiny in the red flare. I tried to feel perfectly at home, but discovered a deep consciousness of being overdressed. My straw hat I could have hurled into a ladle of steel. Some one yelled, "Watch yourself!" and I looked up, with some horror, to note half the mill moving slowly but resolutely onward, bent on my annihilation. I was mistaken. It was the charging-machine, rattling and grinding past furnace No. 7.