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Trip-hammers are very pleasant things to look at, working so massively as they do, and yet so accurately; chewing up the hot iron, as it were, and fashioning it into shape, with a sort of mighty and gigantic gentleness in their mode of action. What great things man has contrived, and is continually performing! What a noble brute he is!
Sword-factories had sprung up, since the breaking out of the war, along the little streams which emptied into the Mohawk, through the Oneida Valley; and some of them kept up the clink of the trip-hammers and the whirr of the emory-wheels that shaped and polished sword-blades, not far from West Falls.
The Empire battery, together with heavy naval guns that had been brought up, and armored trains, were all concentrating their trip-hammers on the place. It was now evident that every living thing in the woods must be dead, as nothing could live under the hurricane of fire. We next attacked the road, stopping the German reserves and ammunition from getting near. Then "Over!"
"Just keep quiet about this little affair," I said to my wife; "we shall come across an explanation in time, and may never have any more of it." We kept quiet, and for five days so did "the spirits," as Miss Fellows was pleased to pronounce the trip-hammers. The fifth day I came home early, as it chanced, from the office. Miss Fellows was writing letters in the parlor.
The four trip-hammers two bull-headed, two calf-headed champed, like carnivorous maws, upon red bars of iron, and over their banquet they roared the big-toned music of the trip-hammer chorus, "Now, then! hit hard! Strike while Iron's hot. Life's short. Art's long."
She could see the men, too, moving in the glow of ruddy light; she could see again the brilliant sparks flying from under the thundering trip-hammers, the cyclopean eyes that glared up at heaven at night, the great rumbling drays, the freight moving to and from the spur. Now there was no sound; nothing but silence, with the suggestion of a tomb.
Little, however, is this heeded by the people of Merthyr; they are lulled to repose by the clatter of iron bars and the thumping of trip-hammers, but are instantaneously awakened by the briefest intervals of silence.
She felt an almost overpowering impulse to turn and run away, but that would mean certain death. Her only hope was to keep her position firmly, and to swing her skirts and scream. If the first steer swerved and passed her, his followers might do so too. He seemed of mammoth proportions as he lurched toward her. His head was lowered, and his great hoofs pounded the ground like trip-hammers. Closer!
Some colossal foundry, the flaming of the fire, the melted metal, the pounding trip-hammers, the surging crowds of workmen shifting from point to point, the murky shadows, the rolling haze, the discord, the crudeness, the deafening din, the disorder, the dross and clouds of dust, the waste and extravagance of material, the shafts of darted sunshine through the vast open roof-scuttles aloft-the mighty castings, many of them not yet fitted, perhaps delay'd long, yet each in its due time, with definite place and use and meaning Such, more like, is a symbol of America.
Poor girl! how her brain throbbed and how her heart beat like ten thousand little trip-hammers! the usual and very proper penalty which we pay for an indiscretion! Here it becomes necessary to pause and introduce a new and altogether indispensable character. Not new to the world sorrow for the world that it is not!
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