Iron Man

“ The iron workers are civilization's shock troops grappling with tyrannous nature on her own ground and conquering new territory in which man can live in safety and peace. Steel houses with glass windows are born of his efforts. There is a glory in this fight; man feels a sense of grandeur. We are robbing no one. From the harsh bosom of the hills we wring the iron milk that makes us strong. Nature is no kind mother; she resists with flood and earthquake, drought and cyclone. Nature is fierce and formidable, but fierce is man's soul to subdue her. The stubborn earth is iron, but man is iron too. ”

“ The lever which wakens this automaton to life, which endows its brain with genius and its fingers with cunning, is the rod of empire. All the lines of modern development converge in the machine-tool shop, and they are all lines of iron, whether consisting of a fine wire strung on poles in mid-air or of huge bars resting on the solid earth. Iron is the king of metals but the slave of man. Its magnetic quality guides the mariner on the sea, and its tough fibre and density sustain the weight of the locomotive on the land. ”

“ Every arrow was as perfect as it could be made, from feather to point. Every head of flint or bone had been tested to make sure that it was firm. Each young man had his own little sack full of bread ready baked, so that no fire by its smoke need betray them; while as to the danger because they had no fire—why, that was a part of the game. Lastly—but in Umpl's eyes the most important of all—they carried, as of old, in a sling, the Iron Star. Surely this was not the time to leave that good-luck-bringer at home, so Umpl reasoned. Thus the Star once more set out upon its travels. ”

“ For years the names of oil king and iron master have been a hissing and a byword among the hot-heads in America. Yet oil king and iron master filled a world with motor lorries. The blessings these have brought to every man are more than he can measure. We mention this as one: They stopped the Germans at Verdun and saved our civilization. It was an iron war and our iron won.
My days were spent at forge and puddling furnace. The iron that I made is civilization's tools. I ride by night in metal bedrooms. ”

“ And so it was that a lone and dreadful man, stalking day and night through the New Damascus iron mill like a tormented apparition, goading his men to the point of frenzy, using them up and casting them off, yet holding them to it by force of contempt for fibre that snapped,—that one man in a spirit of madness frustrated the steel age and made it to limp on iron rails long after the true steel to shoe it with had been available. ”

“ It is by the aid of iron that we construct houses, cleave rocks, and perform so many other useful offices of life. But it is with iron also that wars, murders, and robberies are effected, and this, not only hand to hand, but from a distance even, by the aid of missiles and winged weapons, now launched from engines, now hurled by the human arm, and now furnished with feathery wings. The last I regard as the most criminal artifice that has been devised by the human mind; for, as if to bring death upon man with still greater rapidity, we have given wings to iron and taught it to fly. ”

“ The new stokers took their evening trick, each determined to hold up his end of the work with the rest of the men. And each did. Not a man in that hot, fiery pit shoveled more coal on that watch, or shoveled it to better advantage than did the Iron Boys.
The man Smith shoveled at the furnace door next to Steve Rush, and the former lost no opportunity to hurl rough jokes and taunts at the Iron Boy. ”

“ Coal and iron. When the first bituminous lump blazed unexpectedly on the hearth of the amazed cottager, the iron that had been man’s servant for so long, stirred in its first waking to mastership, a mastery achieved at last, incredible in its degree, incredible in its potentiality. Creatures of its own, and allies brought into being before or since, but now taking a new force and applied with new motives, gunpowder, steam, electricity, join with it in plausibly offering their services as beneficent agents toward the annihilating of life ”

“ Again was there silence as Iron-face sat pondering a question for his son; then a goodman of the Upper Dale, Gritgarth to wit, spake and said:
‘Gold-mane mine, tell us how many is this folk; I mean their fighting-men?’
‘Well asked, neighbour,’ said Iron-face.
Said Face-of-god: ‘Their fighting-men of full age may be five score; but besides that there shall be some two or three score of women that will fight, whoever says them nay; and many of these are little worse in the field than men; or no worse, for they shoot well in the bow. ”

“ All was unseen, much was unguessed; the blind fought the blind; and yet through it all was order, purpose, control. We permeated the entire organization of the Iron Heel with our agents, while our own organization was permeated with the agents of the Iron Heel. It was warfare dark and devious, replete with intrigue and conspiracy, plot and counterplot. And behind all, ever menacing, was death, violent and terrible. Men and women disappeared, our nearest and dearest comrades. ”

“ It was only after the next great advance that we found man utilizing iron for his purposes of civilization. This metal, which with us is so common, was in those days very expensive, so much so that it could be used only for purposes of war and as the gifts of kings.
But the world was traveling fast and it was not long before the iron-carbon alloy, steel, was produced. Even so, many hundreds of years elapsed before the present wonderful age was ushered in through the great inventions of Henry Bessemer and the Siemens brothers. ”

“ An iron-clad is a new man-of-war that's going to take the place of the old. The Merrimac is not a frigate any longer; she's the iron-clad Virginia, and we rather think she's going to make her name remembered. She's over there at the Gosport Navy Yard, and she's almost ready. She's covered over with iron plates, and she's got an iron beak, or ram, and she carries ten guns. On the whole, she's the ugliest beauty that you ever saw! She's almost ready to send to Davy Jones's locker a Yankee ship or two. Commodore Buchanan commands her, and you know who he is! ”

“ Thomas Murphy the timekeeper.”
“Exactly,” said Uncle John.
“Mr. Murphy,” Billy went on, “says that iron moves the world.”
“I should say,” said Uncle John, deliberately, “that power generally has to be put into an iron harness before anything can move; but Mr. Murphy evidently knows what he is talking about.”
“He says,” continued Billy, “that iron mills are very important places; and that, for his part, he’s glad that he works in an iron mill.”
“That’s the way every man ought to feel about his work,” said Uncle John; “all the work in the world has to be done by somebody.” ”

“ Dazzling was the sheen of their gleaming helmets, their fresh-burnished breastplates, and glittering shields as they joined battle with one another. Iron indeed must be his courage who could take pleasure in the sight of such a turmoil, and look on it without being dismayed. ”

“ When seen partially lit up by the glowing masses of white-hot iron, with only the rays of bright sunshine gleaming through the holes in the roof, and the dark, black, smoky vaults in which the cumbrous machinery was heard rumbling away in the distance—while the moving parts were dimly seen through the murky atmosphere, mixed with the sounds of escaping steam and rushes of water; with the half-naked men darting about with masses of red-hot iron and ladles full of molten cast-iron—it made a powerful impression upon the mind. ”

“ A man must have weighed a great deal when he had a full suit of armor on, and he must have been splendid to look at and rather hard to kill.
“Those old smiths certainly made a fine art of their work in iron. They got plenty of credit for it, too. In the Anglo-Saxon times they were really treated as officers of rank.
“When a man was depending on his sword to protect his family, he naturally respected a man who could make good swords. The smiths sort of held society together.”
Billy, looking around the room, saw that one side had spears and shields and helmets hung all over it ”

“ Virtue would strike me blind if I should laugh at your wars. By music, pipes, and stripes you are excited to things contrary to all harmony. Iron, a metal more proper for ploughs and tillage, is fitted for slaughter and death; men raising armies of men, covet to kill one another, and punish them that quit the field for not staying to murder men. They honour as valiants such as are drunk with blood ”

“ When a-crunch upon a rock, with a thundering Titan shock, goes some shapeless metal block, to immortal smash?
Oh! it's real, rasping fun! Mighty hull, monster gun, all are mine ere all's done; and the millions madly spent
On a lollopping wolloping kettle, with ten thousand tons of metal sink as the Titans settle, turtle-turned, or wrenched and rent,
To my rocks and my ooze. I seem little like to lose by the "Progress" some abuse, and the many crack up.
Ah! Neptune, sour old lad, Davy Jones may well look glad at the modern Iron-clad, and thank Armstrong and Krupp! ”

“ You think, perhaps, that your iron is wonderfully useful in a pure form, but how would you like the world, if all your meadows, instead of grass, grew nothing but iron wire—if all your arable ground, instead of being made of sand and clay, were suddenly turned into flat surfaces of steel—if the whole earth, instead of its green and glowing sphere, rich with forest and flower, showed nothing but the image of the vast furnace of a ghastly engine—a globe of black, lifeless, excoriated metal? ”

“ Prescott knew that Billy had never before seen a silhouette.
“That kind of picture,” he said, “does make a man look as black as his own hat, though it is often a good profile. I used to make them myself. Some night I’ll make one of you.
“Now that you’ve seen the musket, I think that you had better take a look at this suit of armor that I have been trying to make stand up here like a knight.
“This coat of mail is made of links, you see. Sometimes they were made of scales of iron linked together. ”

“ Iron Smelting Superstition.—"The union of a man and a woman is always considered absolutely necessary for the operation, the general belief being that the iron ore would not melt unless the fire beneath be blown with a pair of bellows, worked by a man with his younger brother's wife passing her arms round his waist from behind." ”

“ Men were tormenting the elements, parting iron from his natural affinities, giving him in new marriage without love or consent, audaciously creating what God had forgotten—steel! steel! steel! There in that smutted deep were tools walking about like fabled monsters, obedient and docile, handling flaming ingots of metal with the ponderous ease and precision of elephants moving logs. There amid clangor and confusion shrieking little bipeds were raising gigantic ominous shapes from shapelessness. ”

“ They gave up their lives for humanity, no sacrifice was too great for them to accomplish, while inexorable necessity compelled them to bloody expression in an age of blood. The Fighting Groups constituted the one thorn in the side of the Iron Heel that the Iron Heel could never remove. ”

“ Then Ulf set the mail on a post and bade Thorolf the Strong send a spear through it if he could.
Scornfully the giant hurled a javelin at the mark, and gasped as it fell shivered like glass at the foot of the post. On the armour, not a scar!
"It is dwarf-worked; elves did it!" he cried. And for a like reason many a sword and suit of armour has been thought to be made by magic by men who did not know of nickel steel.
But not all of the Star was used in that suit of armour. Some of it Ulf kept for sword and battle-axe. ”

“ But iron itself, when excited by a loadstone, seizes iron no less strongly than the loadstone. Therefore those fights, seditions, and conspiracies in the stone, as if it were nursing up perpetual quarrels, whence it might seek auxiliary forces, are the ravings of a babbling old woman, not the inventions of a distinguished mage. Others have lit upon sympathy as the cause. There may be fellow-feeling, and yet the cause is not fellow-feeling; for no passion can rightly be said to be an efficient cause. Others hold likeness of substance, many others insensible rays as the cause ”

“ We are with them between contending hosts, unable to move, wild with thirst, the life ebbing slowly away among the withered leaves. We see them pierced by balls and torn with shells, in the trenches, by forts, and in the whirlwind of the charge, where men become iron, with nerves of steel. ”

“ HOW EDITH FAIRHAIR SPUN THE SNOW-WHITE YARN ULF, THE YOUNG VIKING THE STATUE OF LEIF ERICSSON THE HUNTING OF THE BEAR THE GHOSTS AND WOLVES THEY SAW BEYOND THE FIRE THE FLAG OF THE WHITE BEAR'S HEAD WHERE LOUIS FOUND THE ARMOUR OF THE VIKING THE IRON HAND ON THE MAGNA CHARTA THE TENT POLE OF THE SARACEN IN THE CAMP OF THE ARABS CAPTAIN MYLES STANDISH SPARK I. HOW THE STAR CAME INTO THIS WORLD. To begin with, it all happened a very long time ago,—some say five thousand years, some say ten thousand years, and one wise man says it never happened at all ”

“ Iron indeed plays a highly important part in modern civilization. Out of it are formed alike the sword and the ploughshare, the cannon and the printing-press; and while civilization continues partial and half-developed, as it still is, our liberties and our industry must necessarily in a great measure depend for their protection upon the excellence of our weapons of war as well as on the superiority of our instruments of peace. ”

“ Campbell, "really was once worshipped by a people with whom iron was rare. Iron is rare, while stone and bronze weapons are common, in British tombs, and the sword of these stories is a personage. It shines, it cries out—the lives of men are bound up in it. ”