Sabine Baring-Gould

“ There were many puddlers engaged upon a vast mass of ore in a certain smelting furnace. You must know that none but the strongest and brawniest men can be employed on this work, for the fire eats into their bones and destroys them in a very few years, unless they are exceedingly powerful and healthy.
Peter Lundy was the largest and most muscular man at the furnace, and he worked the glowing iron with gigantic force. ”

“ George, lad, come—you must learn the trade.” The boy followed.
Lundy unlocked the silent foundry. The fires below were tended by a man all night, but the upper portion, containing the exposed metal, was kept locked.
Peter divested himself of his clothing, anointed himself as high as the waist, drew a felt cap over his head, placed his feet in the stone shoes, and took up his ladle. Then he stepped cautiously into the fused iron.
George turned aside his head: but he could not stop his ears to the moans and gasps of his father. When he looked again Peter was moving through the fire. ”

“ There are certain men employed in iron-furnaces to work up the molten iron before it is run into molds—these are called puddlers. They have huge rakes and spuds which they strike into the smelted ore, working it about till all the earthly particles, and those other things existing in hammered, but never found in cast, iron, and the nature of which we hardly understand, are utterly burnt out. This life of the metal appears in keen scintillations on the surface ”

“ A pair of stone shoes lay by the bedside.
It was very early still, and Peter determined on trying his luck at the furnace at once. He took an old ladle with him, slipped out of the door without awakening his son or the babe, and was soon at the foundry. No one had arrived as yet, but the iron was melted—fires having been kept up during the night, so that the ore might be ready for the puddlers. The top of the colander, like the mouth of a kiln, was open, and the fused mass glared up, the brick rim being at white heat also. ”

“ The iron-workers are not quite ignorant of this truth, but believe that their hopes of salvation lie in the metal they work. The hammered iron they find to bend buxomly to their will, and the molten iron to be dull and lifeless ”

“ Now, in order that a man may be a good workman, he must become part and parcel of his work. The fruit of the toil must, in like manner, become so intimately united with its artificer, that in it he shall really, and not metaphorically, live. ”

“ Thus for centuries the artist can still do good works, when his pious handicraft excites holy aspirations in others; and thus he can reap the benefit of them. He cannot be accounted dead till his handiwork is utterly destroyed. ”