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 of Hecla, among which you have walked with fear, knowing that one false step might be fatal, or, perhaps, with the intoxicating fumes of sulphur in your nostrils, dropped to your knees and crawled.

But perhaps the most awesome of all sights in Woolwich is that of the big furnace-house for the manufacture of the U M steel. I think I have witnessed in various parts of the world many scenes of nature in her wrath—scenes of earthquake, eruption, tidal wave, geyser, and boiling river—but I doubt if I have ever been more awed, more moved, and in a sense more terrified, than by the spectacle here presented of the physical forces of nature chained and harnessed to the work of man. How can I, who have no mechanical science, convey a sense of it? A huge, clay-coloured oven, shapeless like a wart, thirty to forty feet high, topped with an open mouth like the crater of a small volcano, belching out a thick column of hungry flame, which comes with a blast