Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 2).djvu/206

 start with all the confidence begot of the recollection of schoolday feats. Up, up, up—phew!—it is warm work, and breathing is not so easy after a hundred and fifty steps have been rapidly passed over, as it was at the beginning. All the time we have been running round the building, immediately inside the shell, as it were, and on our left, as we make revolution after revolution, the shower of lead continues, the sun through the various windows now and again glinting on it and making it look more like summer rain than ever. On the first stage no one is at work, and there is nothing to see except a crucible or boiler, pretty much the shape of that we have seen in the family laundry. So away we go again manfully, with "Excelsior," and the "Pilgrim’s Progress," alternately flitting through our minds, until at last the top stage is reached. Though we are some 200 feet above the earth, we are not exactly on the summit of the tower yet, but only in a sort of top story, and some feet above us is the roof on which a flagstaff is erected, apparently in a vain attempt to get at the sky.

The secret of shot-making is ours at last. In the centre of this top stage is a trap door wide open, yawning in a sinister way which warns the new comer to beware. Through the trap door runs a huge chain attached to an elongated box by means of which the pig lead leaning against the walls has been hoisted. A man is standing at a boiler, similar to that seen on the stage below, containing the molten lead. The heat is very great, and as he ladles the liquid metal into a perforated pan or sort of colander in front of him, the perspiration stands out on his brow in big drops, suggestive of the shot itself. To make shot, however, something more is essential than a great height, a colander, and molten lead. The metal before it arrives in pig form—that is, in large bars—has been prepared with antimony or arsenic. When it has been thoroughly heated, a sort of scum forms on it, which if it were from milk would be called cream, but being from lead is called dross. This is carefully preserved. Some of it is placed in the perforated pan before the molten lead is poured into it. The lead makes its way through the dross, and then escapes through the holes in the pan, into space. The degree of heat, the amount of dross, the distance, the quantity of lead are all things which have to be thought of, and which can only be properly regulated by an experienced hand. It looks simple enough to pour the hot lead into the pan, but it is very much simpler to spoil the shot by indifferent knowledge of what is wanted.

Whilst our artist is getting a picture of the man at work, we may take the opportunity of telling our readers what we have been able to discover of the origin of this method of shot-making. The story goes that it was all an accident, just as Isaac