My alarm has a knob on top that brings silence when pressed down. I struck it a blow just now, with my palm reached from under the bedclothes, and slid out of bed. In a sort of stumble I moved to the bathroom, lit the gas-jet, which shrieked instantly and got my face with breathless haste into cold water. Dim figures of men with dinner-buckets were visible through a frosted window, slipping down Factory Hill, and I blinked at them through watery eyes. "That alarm has lost another five minutes,' I decided. All hope of a shave evaporated, and I made a rapid descent of the back stairs, buttoning the last three vest buttons as I went over stone steps into the street.

Outside there was a paling starlight, and hard cold that made my limbs shrink to each other for comfort, and shot my coat collar around my ears. Down Factory Hill I went in a halfrun, passing slow-paced hunkies and nervous machinists returning from the night shift at Page's. At this hour there are no noises in Martinsberg, only the faint shriek and grind of the foundry crane that runs all night. It is a sound that to me has an eerie and infernal quality in its vibrations. It suggests an ageless continuance of foundry labor: slow, grinding, uninteresting, and eternal. I toughen a weakened morale by blowing my nose, and thinking very fixedly upon breakfast.

I

The faces of several hundred brass and copper employees met every morning in the quarter-mile between boarding-house and rolling mill are unchanging. The same look and gait, with minor substitutions in walking groups a new feller for a new girl; a girl who once walked alone, now arm in arm with three others. Those faces, empty, lined, careful, reckless, surrendered, are drawn and tinted clearer in my brain than my own cousins'; I have spent more hours of my life looking into them, and putting them into consciousness. I meet them in slightly different spots each morning, as they or I vary our leaving times, and many, with a miraculous invariability, beside the same tenement or post in the brass-mill fence. There is an old Irishman, whom I met this morning at the space where Factory Hill spreads into Main, from whom the mill must have exacted thirty- or forty-odd years of daily passage here. He is lame and as crudely clothed a man as I have ever seen. Like Cruikshank's drawings

of English laborers - shapeless baggy pants, jagged cuffs, black coat, ragged like a stage pauper's; safety-pin at the neck; black hat felt, without band or shape. Gray hair over part of his forehead; a mill complexion, a stiffened knee. There were all the wrinkles and lines of strain, anxiety, and age in his face, coupled with a curious look of boyishness. It was as if the environment compelled his body to endure the cares and labors of a responsible life without any corresponding growth or hardening of spiritual muscle.

Greeks, Portuguese, Syrians, Russians, Poles, Italians, and Americans; laborers, skilled workmen, the whole hierarchy of bosses the muffles' chief in the brass mill, the shippingroom foremen, the bosses of the wire mill and casting shop moving into the mill between 6.55 and 7.

I opened my locker, and pulled out a torn newspaper to stand on with stocking feet, while climbing into army field shoes. They are joyously comfortable to stand in, and resist the mill environment better than any known footwear. I balance on one foot and draw on blue overalls, till three scalping-machine operators brush by and tumble me into a locker. The whistle blows seven o'clock.

I'm on the 'pony' rolls with Bill Hartley, roller, who is there now cutting a sample with immense shears. The blocker and helper are beside him, putting on their gloves.

I grab the end of the coil. It has already been mounted on the reel, and at Bill's nod I shove the end, with something of a lunge, between the two revolving rolls. Several thousand pounds' pressure are applied instantly, and the copper ribbon shoots through, a thirty-second thinner and flat as a strip of Colgate's. Speedily I relapse into one of the oil-swabbing automata of which there are twelve in the mill.

I dip into the oil in my pail, using a swab half the size of your fist, and streak on not too much — upper side, lower side, of that moving ribbon. It takes fifteen minutes for this bar alone to grind through. Sweep your swab like a paint-brush on the moving metal, top side, bottom side, and then meeting or almost meeting — the oil-smear of your last stroke.

Fifteen minutes pass. I get up from my box; my Portuguese helper, who came in ten minutes ago, slides a new 300-pound coil on the reel, lying on its side. We right it together - I know about the knee-bend now, that puts your back under the load.

Then for new oila green stream, finger-size, from the tap, sunlight color into it; and McCarthy's helper is behind me waiting.

'Oop!' Half a cup slithering to the floor beside his foot. He gives me a grin of white teeth, and says something in Polish English. I worked with him on Mac's rolls last month.

Back to the soap-box, a long stroke, top-side and bottom-side, fifteen minutes to go. I watch the grain in the metal, — stained as it is from the pickle-tubs, thinking, How'd you like to be an inspector? Watch for blister, cracks, humps, foreign impurities, gauge The Colgate ribbon of metal swerves a little, coming from the rolls; reels a little to this side, a little to that; what of it? Swab top and bottom a long stroke and even.

There are four more coils in this order. In the middle of the third, the bar sticks in the rolls, stutters, jerks on for an inch or two, shrieks, and stops. I don't know why kerosene prevents sticking; but it does, and I squirt it

Bill helps me mount the next reel; the Portuguese has retired for a drink of water. A wrestling to untwist and bend into the guides - all your strength. Then the rolls bite; the ribbon moves through, and I resume swabbing from my soap-box. This time I look at rolls and not metal smooth cylinders of chilled iron, evenly revolving, a foot in diameter, costing $600 a pair. Look flat, but they 're not. Covered with 'humps and valleys'a fraction of a thousandth of an inch high or deep. A roller worth his salt can tell them by touching with sensitive finger-tips.

I apply my hand, pass my fingers over the oily tops of the rolls, and try to imagine I feel the 'humps.' Fingers get caught sometimes, 'sticker's' fingers, roller's fingers. The hand may break, either at the knuckles or the wrist. What would happen if mine caught? I think it through with a morbid intensity. Some one would run to the engineer, in the centre of the mill. The mill engine would ease slowly and stop at length-three or

four minutes, five, maybe, before the fingers ceased grinding! Drop it for the Lord's sake! - An even stroke, long-top-side and bottom.

Bill went to the drinking fountain near the clock, and coming back said quickly, 'It's seven minutes of last bar.'

So we watched it curl through, impatiently, wishing we could speed the unvarying rate of the rolls, and hoping it would pull out by five minutes of twelve-which it did.

Kerosene will cut away grease, and we all washed hands in it, put the shears and wrench in Bill's locker to prevent neighborly thieving, and rushed for the sink. There was sullenness and cold water. I borrowed sand soap from Zalinski, an old Pole who inspects copper.

II

I wish I could tell all there is to tell about Mrs. Badger's boarding-house. But I can't for it would take a very long book, and it has only indirectly though importantly to do with copper and brass. It was there I learned most about Martinsberg politics and religion the hatreds of Catholics for Protestants and Protestants for Catholics, and a good deal about people's ancestry and the complicated way they had intermarried. It was there also that I was told that Mrs. Bertran, who lived on the hill and went to Cape Cod summers, began life by 'accommodatin'.'

With Mrs. Badger's advancing age and rheumatism, she slowly cut off the heads of her boarders. She now had left Mr. Lampson, a clerk, Mr. Benny, a foundry workman, Mr. Steffens, a draughtsman, Miss Packard, a schoolteacher, and myself.

To-day we had a boiled dinner, and politics.

'Why should n't the mayor sell

'Because it's a disgrace for a mayor of the town to be carryin' on trade up and down the street, overalls 'n' all, while he 's mayor.'

Mrs. Badger invariably discussed the mayor at the top of her lungs.

'It 's honest,' observed Mr. Benny, but without conviction.

apron.

'It goes into the skin,' he said, tapping his legs.

Which was a truth. I had found my own legs growing discolored since I began sticking. It soaked easily through all protections.

'What else?'

'He's a Mick.'
'Yes?'

'A dirty Mick,' she continued.

'Did not his wife's sister keep a saloon once?' put in the German draughtsman.

'Besides,' - Mrs. Badger's tone grew hoarse; she had not heard Mr. Steffens's evidence, 'he 's a Democrat!'

'Anything else?'

Bill made an adjustment on the rolls a delicate job, - the squeezing of bars .015 of an inch thick down to .010.

'Plenty of oil this time.'

The one o'clock whistle blew. I stood close to the moving ribbon of thin metal and drowned it in roll-oil.

There is almost a technique in rolling 'thin stuff.' Thin copper, hardly thicker than thick paper, will tear, crumple, and go crooked, if you 're not considerate. As I drown the metal with oil, this is the ninth bar, I'll go over in my head little things caught from Bill.

Bar has to pass over several things

I went down-town before they finished, to buy a can of machinist's soap, and returned to the mill by 12.50. (It seemed reasonable to enter by the 'rivet-and-bolt' door, which is just as near as the front way by the hot rolls, and I ran a chance of seeing the rivetand-bolt stock clerk, who is the prettiest girl in the north mill. But she had n't come.)

By the time I put myself into overalls and field shoes, and the black canvas cap with green visor that I had kept over from steel days on the open hearth, gangs were coming in by the hot rolls. The men who ate out of dinner buckets were putting them back into lockers and moving with very great leisure toward their machines. On the rolls next mine, the sticker- a fat Slav — turned

up

--

first, a round rod and see that it 's smooth and won't scratch the copper, which is delicate. (Rub it with emery paper.) Then over a brass plate under a wooden peg. (See that they both are smooth emery and sandpaper.) Have the guides fit the bar tight.

Finished - twelve bars of 'thin stuff.'

We push the truck to the annealing furnace, and bring a towering one back from the hot rolls. A whale of an order, 45 coils, an eleven-hour job, with nothing to it, after the set is made, but shoving a bar in one side of devouring rolls, swabbing on oil for fifteen minutes, and watching it automatically wind up on the other side.

Bill makes the set. It 's guessing done with weird accuracy. The upper roll is screwed up or down, and two iron bars, sticking from the top of the stand, achieve that adjustment.

Space between the rolls widens from .010 of an inch to .175.

A short little bar is gobbled through for a try. Gauged with a micrometer. Found to be .170.

The iron control-bars are jarred a little by Bill's hand; space between rolls opens imperceptibly.

Another little bar is passed through. Gauged with the micrometer-.175. Ah-h!

First big bar. 'Shoot!' Coil is mounted on reel, end tugged up, rolls bite. I sit on my soap-box and begin on the job again: swab on oil, regular top and bottom not too much.

I won't watch any longer this moving belt of copper slipping by under my swab with the greenish oil dripping on. My eyes go for rest to the gang on the next rolls. A Portuguese Negro is there as sticker's helper, at this instant fishing with a stick for small coils in a great tub of blue pickle. Near him is the sticker, a man with a great stomach and a small head, who treats his metal to great slushes of oil which run off the edges to the top of his boots and the floor. By twisting I can see the roller. He is thin-faced, with glasses, a short pipe, and an

calculable leisure he gauges his bars between puffs.

The last pair of rolls are mighty ones, grinding long thick bars which take three men to manipulate. The blocker is a high-shouldered fellow in a blue shirt, who stands close and grabs the bar when it first shows an edge through the iron rolls. Over the tops of the stands I can make out a small overhead crane, moving industriously in a cloud of steam from hot tubs.

I turn back to the moving copper, and find my pail all but empty. I'll fill after this bar. Instead of half turning as I did to see the aisle of rolls, I look straight ahead at eye-level. There are draw benches' hauling copper through dies into special shapes. I can't see them well, and my ignorance of their mechanics is complete. A little to the left is the square box of a mill office. Through the window of it I can see a man with arms on his desk, and a head with a thin patch of hair, buried in them. The boss, Halsey. 'He sleeps all day, but by God, he knows copper.' This is what Bill says.

For some reason the mill noises break into my attention suddenly with all their different layers and divisions of sound. I have been too much given to the technique of rolling, or to the numbing regularity of a sticker's strokes, to notice them before. I listen now and hear them all. Underneath is the fundamental engine rumble and the sound of heavy machinery turning in its bearings. Above that the local grind of my own copper strip going through the pony rolls, and one of our couplings banging a loose board of the sheathing at each turnover.

For the scalping machines, buzz is too soft a word. It is a compound sound, the rapid clawing of copper surfaces by six talons of steel. Close to, you catch the individual scrape; at my