Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/187

 output of ore, and in order to accommodate foreign friends Uncle Sam has recently melted 200,000,000 of our old friends into bars and 50,000,000 more of them are on the way to the furnace. None have been coined since 1904, as apparently they are not popular. The pride of the Mint centers just now upon the two new electric furnaces, the larger of which has only been installed a few weeks (a Swedish invention, by the way), but the old gas ovens are more spectacular to the visitor because the flames are more visible. When the heavy door is slid aside you can see the crucible (made of graphite from Ceylon) with its mass of silver dollars, standing patiently in the furious glow. Then, if you are lucky, you will see them ladling out the liquid silver into the molds. One of the workmen held a slip of paper to the boiling metal: it burst into flame and he calmly lit his pipe with it. In other furnaces sheets of nickel from which Argentine coins had been punched were being melted, surrounded by a marvelous radiance of green and golden fire. All about you are great ingots of copper, silver, nickel and boxes of queer little nickel nuggets, formed by dropping the hot liquid into ice water. It is a place in which one would willingly spend a whole day watching the wonders which those accustomed to them take so calmly. In the vault just outside the furnace room I was shown between eighteen and nineteen million dollars' worth of gold bars stacked up on shelves.