and roar as from the bowels of the earth, driven up by some frantic subterranean tempest, and scattering showers of blue stars in a ring about it. The light is so fierce that you put coloured glasses before your eyes to protect them; the noise is so deafening that it drowns all human speech. And around the furnace stand the half-stark furnace-men, fifteen to twenty feet away, but within the radius of its sweltering heat, silhouetted even in the glistening light of the vast chamber against the white glare of the roaring oven.
At the first moment you lose consciousness of the actual purpose of this gigantic agent of man's will, and think of it instinctively as a great sacrificial altar to some pagan deity—some far more real and terrible upleaping of heavenly or hellish fire than ever struck down to their knees in worshipful awe the terrified multitudes before the altars of Pompeii.
But you are brought back to the reality of the modern world a few minutes later, when you cross to the shed in which the
