Do you remember an old tale of Norse mythology? How somewhere, far in the north, there stood a high peak of iron, which was a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide? And how a little bird came to it once every thousand years to sharpen its beak? And how, when the mountain was gone, a single second of all eternity would have passed by? I heard it told as a child. I remembered it always, and I told it to my own boys when they began to learn history. It seemed the invention of some prehistoric Hans Christian Andersen. It belonged to the imaginary scenery of our dreams. The story has come true, and I have found my old mountain where I least expected it. To make the cycle of coincidence perfect, this hill was named after a bird. The Lapp, with a fine sense of sound, called the ptarmigan “Kiru.” Kirunavaara no longer hears the shrill “kiru-kiru” of rising birds. Twice a day it listens to the terrific detonation of half a hundred charges of dynamite. Then it is shaken by the little trains which carry the rock to the valley. In the evening, it sees the lights of the large electric engines which hoist the valuable metal across the arctic wilderness of Lake Tornotrask. Two months later, the ore has been melted and worked into those modern articles of trade which go by the name of bridges and automobiles and ships and apartment houses and a thousand other things which once promised to elevate man from the ranks of the beasts of burden. What has become of that promise, the survivors of the last eight years know with great if gruesome accuracy. Even the humble Lapp has heard of the great upheaval, and has asked why the white people should kill each other when the whole world was full of reindeer and when God has given us the hills and the plains so that forever there should be food enough for the long days of summer and the longer nights of the endless winter. [Illustration] But the ways of the Lapp are not the ways of the white man. These simple followers of a pure and much undiluted nature follow the even tenor of their ways as their ancestors did, five and ten thousand years ago. We, on the other hand, have our engines and we have our railroad trains and we have our factories and we cannot get rid of these iron servants without destroying the very basis of our civilization. We may hate these ungainly companions, but we need them. In time to come, we shall know how to be their masters. Then Plato shall give us a revised Republic where all the houses are heated by steam and where all the dishes are washed by electricity. We are not suffering from too much machinery, but from too little. For let there be enough iron servants and more of us shall be able to sit on the tops of mountains and stare into the blue sky and waste valuable hours, imagining the things that ought to be.