The Iron Puddler [20]
serpents shoot forth from different trains of rollers, and are carried away, wrought iron fit for bridging the creek, shoeing the mule and hooping the barrel that brings the farmers apples into town.
"Life in these mills is a terrible life," the reformers say. "Men are ground down to scrap and are thrown out as wreckage." This may be so, but my life was spent in the mills and I failed to discover it. I went in a stripling and grew into manhood with muscled arms big as a bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say, will destroy a man's lungs, but I worked all day in the mills and had wind enough left to toot a clarinet in the band. I lusted for labor, I worked and I liked it. And so did my forefathers for generations before me. It is no job for weaklings, but neither was tree-felling, Indian fighting, road-making and the subduing of a wild continent to the hand of man as was done by the whole tribe of Americans for the sheer joy of conquering the wild.
There is something in man that drives him forward to do the world's work and build bigger for the coming generations, just as there is something in nature that causes new growth to come out of old dirt and new worlds to be continually spawned from the ashes of old played-out suns and stars. When nature ceases to mold new worlds from the past decay, the universe will wither; and when man loses the urge to build and goes to tearing down, the end of his story is at hand.
A tired Thomas whose wife supported him by running a rooming house once asked me:
"How many do you 'spose there are in the United States that don't have to work?"
"None," I replied, "except invalids and cripples. Every healthy man in this country has to work just the same as he has to breathe. If you don't want to work it is because you're sick. I'm a well man, and I've got to be working all the time or I'd go crazy. I have no more desire to be idle like you than I have a desire to wear women's clothes. It is contrary to normal nature, and that's why I say that any man that gets that way is a sick man."
The fellow was a "free thinker," as he called himself. He was too lazy to shave and his beard was always about two weeks ahead of him. He was working out a plan for communism in the United States. He believed that enough work had now been done to supply the race forever. It was just a question of so evenly dividing the goods that all men instead of a few could loaf the rest of their years.
He had such a tired feeling that he didn't have the ambition of an oyster. He didn't have enough energy to realize he was all in. He took it for granted that the whole race was as tired as he was.
He thought he needed one of the Utopias they talk so much about. What he needed was a dose of castor-oil. I never knew a communist in my life that was a well man.
CHAPTER XIV
BOILING DOWN THE PIGS
An iron puddler is a "pig boiler." The pig boiling must be done at a certain temperature (the pig is iron) just as a farmer butchering hogs must scald the carcasses at a certain temperature. If the farmer's water is too hot it will set the hair, that is, fix the bristles so they will never come out; if the water is not hot enough it will fail to loosen the bristles. So the farmer has to be an expert, and when the water in his barrel is just hot enough, he souses the porker in it, holding it in the hot bath the right length of time, then pulling it out and scraping off the hair. Farmers learned this art by experience long before the days of book farming.
And so the metal "pig boiler" ages ago learned by experience how to make the proper "heat" to boil the impurities out of pig- iron, or forge iron, and change it into that finer product, wrought iron. Pig-iron contains silicon, sulphur and phosphorus, and these impurities make it brittle so that a cast iron teakettle will break at a blow, like a china cup. Armor of this kind would have been no good for our iron-clad ancestors. When a knight in iron clothes tried to whip a leather-clad peasant, the peasant could have cracked him with a stone and his clothes
"Life in these mills is a terrible life," the reformers say. "Men are ground down to scrap and are thrown out as wreckage." This may be so, but my life was spent in the mills and I failed to discover it. I went in a stripling and grew into manhood with muscled arms big as a bookkeeper's legs. The gases, they say, will destroy a man's lungs, but I worked all day in the mills and had wind enough left to toot a clarinet in the band. I lusted for labor, I worked and I liked it. And so did my forefathers for generations before me. It is no job for weaklings, but neither was tree-felling, Indian fighting, road-making and the subduing of a wild continent to the hand of man as was done by the whole tribe of Americans for the sheer joy of conquering the wild.
There is something in man that drives him forward to do the world's work and build bigger for the coming generations, just as there is something in nature that causes new growth to come out of old dirt and new worlds to be continually spawned from the ashes of old played-out suns and stars. When nature ceases to mold new worlds from the past decay, the universe will wither; and when man loses the urge to build and goes to tearing down, the end of his story is at hand.
A tired Thomas whose wife supported him by running a rooming house once asked me:
"How many do you 'spose there are in the United States that don't have to work?"
"None," I replied, "except invalids and cripples. Every healthy man in this country has to work just the same as he has to breathe. If you don't want to work it is because you're sick. I'm a well man, and I've got to be working all the time or I'd go crazy. I have no more desire to be idle like you than I have a desire to wear women's clothes. It is contrary to normal nature, and that's why I say that any man that gets that way is a sick man."
The fellow was a "free thinker," as he called himself. He was too lazy to shave and his beard was always about two weeks ahead of him. He was working out a plan for communism in the United States. He believed that enough work had now been done to supply the race forever. It was just a question of so evenly dividing the goods that all men instead of a few could loaf the rest of their years.
He had such a tired feeling that he didn't have the ambition of an oyster. He didn't have enough energy to realize he was all in. He took it for granted that the whole race was as tired as he was.
He thought he needed one of the Utopias they talk so much about. What he needed was a dose of castor-oil. I never knew a communist in my life that was a well man.
CHAPTER XIV
BOILING DOWN THE PIGS
An iron puddler is a "pig boiler." The pig boiling must be done at a certain temperature (the pig is iron) just as a farmer butchering hogs must scald the carcasses at a certain temperature. If the farmer's water is too hot it will set the hair, that is, fix the bristles so they will never come out; if the water is not hot enough it will fail to loosen the bristles. So the farmer has to be an expert, and when the water in his barrel is just hot enough, he souses the porker in it, holding it in the hot bath the right length of time, then pulling it out and scraping off the hair. Farmers learned this art by experience long before the days of book farming.
And so the metal "pig boiler" ages ago learned by experience how to make the proper "heat" to boil the impurities out of pig- iron, or forge iron, and change it into that finer product, wrought iron. Pig-iron contains silicon, sulphur and phosphorus, and these impurities make it brittle so that a cast iron teakettle will break at a blow, like a china cup. Armor of this kind would have been no good for our iron-clad ancestors. When a knight in iron clothes tried to whip a leather-clad peasant, the peasant could have cracked him with a stone and his clothes