There is a people who have been kicking coal around for five thousand years and have not yet learned that it will burn. Those hills produced gypsies who travel around cheating, dickering and selling gewgaws that are worth nothing. They come among a people who have used their heads. From these people they learned to heat a banana stand with a little coal stove. Having mastered that coal-stove principle, they are going back to their native hills with black magic up their sleeves. “What a superior man am I,” thought that young tribesman swollen with vanity, although he had done nothing. This taught me that some of these thick-headed tribes can be all swelled up with pride when they have little to be proud of. CHAPTER XV. THE IRON BISCUITS In the Sharon town band I played the clarinet from the time I was thirteen until I left that town several years later to chase the fireflies of vanishing jobs that marked the last administration of Cleveland. A bands-man at thirteen, I became a master puddler at sixteen. At that time there were but five boys of that age who had become full-fledged puddlers. Of these young iron workers, I suppose there were few that “doubled in brass.” But why should not an iron worker be a musician? The anvil, symbol of his trade, is a musical instrument and is heard in the anvil chorus from Trovatore. In our rolling mill we did not have an anvil on which the “bloom” was beaten by a trip-hammer as is done in the Old Country. The “squeezer” which combines the functions of hammer and anvil did the work instead.