In the first room there are great furnaces, with dirty-looking caldrons hanging over them, and in these caldrons there is not soup or anything to eat, but gold, pure gold. This gold has been found in far-away countries and brought to England, and the men who bring it get paid so much for it according to its weight, and then the Mint people turn it into coins. The gold is all liquid, seething and boiling. The man who stands by the caldron has a pair of thick leather gloves to protect his hands in case sparks fly out. Suddenly he seizes the caldron with a pair of pincers, and, dragging it from the fire, he tilts it up so that the molten gold runs out in a stream into a number of tubes like long straight jars joined together. The gold flows in, bubbles up, and that one is full to the top; and then the next is filled, and the next, and so on to the end. Then the gold is left to cool. The big caldron goes back on to the furnace to boil more gold. As the gold boils a tiny quantity of it gets into the sides of the caldron and sticks to them, and this is too valuable to lose, and so after the caldron has been used a certain number of times it is broken up and melted so as to recover this gold again, and not a grain is lost. When the gold which has been poured into the jars has cooled it is solid again, and has taken the shape of the jars--that is to say, it is in bars of gold. You will be given one to handle and feel; it is a flat bar of gleaming gold weighing a great deal. The bars are then taken and put under a machine something like a mangle, and the machine squeezes and presses them with such terrific force that they are squeezed out thinner and thinner, and, of course, get longer and longer in the process. Just think what tremendous force must be used to press out a bar of gold! When at last they are ready these long thin slabs of gold are the thickness of a sovereign. Now, each of these bars is passed through a machine, which cuts out of it a double row of holes just the size of sovereigns all the way down, and the little gold pieces thus neatly cut out drop down below into a box. Take one up and look at it; it is smooth and clean and round, the size of a sovereign, but it has as yet no King's head on it, and the edges are smooth, not rough as in a real sovereign. So each of these little round gold pieces is taken away to another room to be finished, and the remainder of the long thin strip out of which they were cut goes back to the caldron to be boiled up again and made into more sovereigns.