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Rh mediate present, and Floyd felt that the conclusion of the work was imminent.

During the first six months of the sliding scale agreement, the price of steel remained high—billets sold at thirty-five dollars a ton—and the mills were running at a good profit. The monthly reports from the superintendents, which Colonel Halket scrutinized with care, were very favorable, in comparison with those which had been made during the previous year under the tonnage system of wages; therefore Colonel Halket triumphantly called the attention of Floyd and of the other officers to the fact that the union had been allowed to establish itself and nothing serious had happened. It was in the last month of this profitable period that his book was issued; in a short time it went through several editions. Floyd read, with rapid alternations of feeling, the copy in which his grandfather had inscribed his handsomest signature, of the old-fashioned, florid type. Some chapters were so unconsciously egotistical and complacent that Floyd squirmed in reading them; it mortified him to think that his grandfather had exposed himself thus to the laughter of the multitude—or worse, of the discriminating. Other passages filled him with pain and concern because of the frankness with which they criticised certain of the associates and subordinates who had helped in the building up of the company; the author's opinions of his own greater wisdom at various crises were as thinly veiled as they had been in the magazine article, which reappeared without change, as a chapter of the book. The utterances on the freedom of labor to arrange its own affairs were more pronounced, the declarations that the employer had nothing to fear from permitting such freedom were more assured than any the author had heretofore made public, and this chapter of theorizing, Floyd felt instinctively, would be prolific of misfortune. On the other hand, there were pages that were generous and not misguided, in which Colonel Halket had recounted some of the fine acts