who are equal to any other danger draw back from riding up a column.

These fears were justified just at the last on the New York tower, and a man named Jack McGreggor had an experience that might well have whitened his hair. The men had reached the 325-foot level, and were placing the last lengths of column but one. McGreggor was riding up one of these lengths alone. It was a huge mass twenty-five feet long, square in section, and large enough to admit a winding ladder inside. It weighed eigh

teen tons.

As the overhead boom lifted the length (with McGreggor astride) and swung it clear of the column it was to rest on, the foreman, watching there like a hawk, wiggled his thumb to the signal-man on a platform below, who pulled four strokes on the bell, which meant "boom up" to the engine-man. So up came the boom, and in came the column, hanging now in true perpendicular, with McGreggor ready to slide down from his straddling seat for the bolting.

Now the foreman flapped his hand palm down, and the signalman was just about to jerk two bells, which means "lower your load," when rip-smash- tear! Far down below a terrible thing had happened: the frame of the engine had snapped right over the bearing and pulled out the large cable drum that was holding the strain of that huge, eighteen-ton column. Down came the falls!

It was just like an elevator breaking loose at the top of its shaft. The column started to fall; there was nothing to stop it; and then then a miracle was worked; it must have been a miracle, it was so extraordinary. The falling column struck squarely, end to end, on the solid column beneath it, rocked a little, righted itself, and stayed there! This was more than Jack McGreggor did, for he came sliding down so fast — with a wild, white face that he all but knocked the foreman over. And the foreman was white himself. What that eighteen-ton column would have done to the bridge, and the boys on it, had it crashed down those three hundred and twenty-five feet, is still a subject of awed discussion.

Very short falls from bridges often kill as surely as the long ones. In one case a man fell eight feet and broke his neck, while

other men have fallen from great heights and escaped. A workman of the Berlin Bridge Company, for instance, fell from a structure in New Hampshire one hundred and twenty feet, and lived. I myself saw Harry Fleager on the East River Bridge, New York, and from his own lips heard his remarkable experience. Fleager is to-day a sturdy, active young man, as I saw him, running a thumping nigger-head engine on the endspan. Only a few months before he had fallen ninety-seven feet smash down to a pile of bricks.

"It happened this way," said he. "One of the big booms. broke under its load just above me, and the tackle-block swung around and caught me back of the head. That knocked me off the false work, and I went straight down to the ground. Just to show you the force of my fall, sir, I struck a timber about thirty feet before I landed; it was eight inches wide and four inches thick, and I snapped it off, hardly slowing up. After that I lay for a week in the hospital with bruises, but there wasn't a bone broken, and I've been at work ever since."

CLASS ACTIVITIES

1. Why are bridge-workers afraid of the bridge?

2. Explain: "They were not afraid of their fear." How did the bridge builders show that they were not afraid of their fear? Tell, if possible, about persons you know who are not afraid of their fears. Tell about a fear you are not afraid of. Tell about a fear you have conquered.

3. Describe the work of the riveters. Is their work a source of danger to the other men? Explain.

4. What is the "traveler" and what does it do? How is it a source of great danger?

5. Explain “riding up a column." Describe the experience of Jack

McGreggor.

6. How do you explain the fact that short falls from bridges sometimes prove as dangerous as long ones?

7. Compare the dangers faced by firemen and by bridge builders (see Book One, p. 364). Which seem more perilous? ADDITIONAL READINGS. 1. "Bridge Building," A. Williams, How It Is Done. 2. "The Bridge Builders," R. Kipling, in The Day's Work, 3-47. 3. "My Fight with Fear," W. O. Saunders, in American Magazine, 97: No. 2, 49, 194–198.

4. HIS JOB

GRACE SARTWELL MASON

Against an autumn sunset the steel skeleton of a twenty-story office building in process of construction stood out black and bizarre. From the lower stories, where masons made music with trowel and hammer, to the top, where steam-riveters rapped out their chorus like giant locusts in a summer field, the great building lived and breathed as if all those human energies that went into its making flowed warm through its steel veins.

In the west window of a woman's club next door, one of the members stood looking out at this building. Behind her at a teatable three other women sat talking. They were discussing the relative advantages of a man's work and a woman's; they had arrived at the conclusion that a man has much the better of it. "Take a man's work," said Mrs. Van Vechten, pouring herself a second cup of tea. "He chooses it; then he is allowed to go at it with absolute freedom. He isn't hampered by the petty details of life that hamper us. He

"Details! My dear, there you are right," broke in Mrs. Bullen. Neither hardship nor poverty had ever touched her. "Details! Sometimes I feel as if I were smothered by them. Servants, and the house, and now these relief societies

She was in her turn interrupted by Cornelia Blair. "The whole fault is the social system," she declared. "Because of it men have been able to take the really interesting work of the world for themselves. They've pushed the dull jobs upon us."

"You're right, Cornelia," cried Mrs. Bullen. “I've always thought that it would be so much easier just to go to an office in the morning and have nothing but business to think of. Don't you feel that way sometimes, Mrs. Trask?"

The woman in the west window turned. There was a gleam in her eyes as she looked at the other three. "The trouble with us women is we're blind and deaf," she said slowly. "We talk a lot about men's work and how they have the best of things, but does it ever occur to one of us what a man pays?"

"What do they pay?" asked Mrs. Van Vechten, her lip curling.

Mrs. Trask turned back to the window. "There's something rather wonderful going on out here," she called. "I wish you'd all come and look."

Just outside the club window the steel-workers pursued their dangerous task, while over their heads a great derrick served their needs with uncanny intelligence. It dropped its chain and picked a girder from the floor. As it rose into space two figures sprang astride either end. The long arm swung up and out; the two "bronco-busters of the sky" were black against the flame of the sunset. Some one shouted; the signal-man pulled at his rope; the derrick-arm swung in a little, with the girder teetering at the end of the chain.

The most interesting moment of the steel-man's job had come, when a girder was to be jockeyed into place. The iron arm swung the girder above two upright columns, lowered it, and the girder began to groove into place. When it wedged a little, one of the men inched along, leaned against space, and wielded his bar. The women stared, for the moment taken out of themselves. Then, as the girder settled into place and the two men slid down the column to the floor, the spectators turned back to their teatable.

"Very interesting," murmured Mrs. Van Vechten; "but I hardly see how it concerns us.

A flame leaped in Mary Trask's face. "It's what we've just been talking about, one of men's jobs. I tell you, men are working miracles all the time that women never see. We envy them their power and freedom, but we seldom open our eyes to see what they pay. Look here, I'd like to tell you about an ordinary man and one of his jobs."

She stopped and looked from Mrs. Bullen's perplexity to Cornelia Blair's superior smile, and her eyes came last to Sally Van Vechten's rebellious frown. "I'm going to bore you, maybe," she laughed grimly. "But it will do you good to listen once to something real."

She sat down and leaned her elbows on the table. "I said that he is an ordinary man," she began; "what I meant is that he started in like the average, without any great amount of training, without money, and without pull of any kind. He had good

health, good stock back of him, an attractive personality, and two years at a technical school those were his assets. He was twenty when he came to New York to make a place for himself, and he was already engaged to a girl back home. He had enough money to keep him for about three weeks, if he lived very economically.

"He has told me often, with a chuckle, how he picked out his employer. All day he walked about with his eyes open for contractors' signs. Whenever he came upon a building in the process of construction he looked it over critically; if he liked the look of the job he made a note of the contractor's name and address in a little green book. For he was to be a builder — of big buildings! That night, when he went to the cheap boarding-house where he had sent his trunk, he told himself that he'd give himself five years to set up an office of his own.

the

"Next day he walked into the offices of Weil & Street first name that headed the list in the little green book asked to see Mr. Weil and, strangely enough, was permitted to see him, too. Even in those raw days Robert had a cheerful assurance tempered with rather a nice deference that often got him what he wanted from older men. When he left the offices of Weil & Street he had been given a job in the estimating-room, at a salary that would just keep him from starving.

"He grew lean and lost color that winter, but he was learning, learning all the time, not only in the office of Weil & Street but at night school, where he studied architecture. When he decided he had all he could get out of the estimating and drawing rooms he asked to be transferred to one of the jobs. They gave him the position of timekeeper on one of the contracts, at a slight advance in salary.

"A man can get as much or as little out of being timekeeper as he chooses. Robert got a lot out of it. He talked with bricklayers, he timed them and watched them, until he knew how many bricks could be laid in an hour; and it was the same way with carpenters, fireproofers, painters, plasterers. He picked out the best workman in each gang, watched him, talked with him, learned all he could of that man's particular task; and it all went down in the little green book. For at the back of his head was