The Voice of the Machines

apor and shadow--like some huge, dim face of Labor, it lifts itself dumbly and looks at me. I suppose, to some it is but a wraith of rusty vapor, a mist of old iron, sparks floating from a chimney, while a train sweeps past. But to me, with its spires of smoke and its towers of fire, it is as if a great door had been opened and I had watched a god, down in the wonder of real things--in the act of making an earth. I am filled with childhood--and a kind of strange, happy terror. I struggle to wonder my way out. Thousands of railways--after this--bind Johnstown to me; miles of high, narrow, steel-built streets--the whole world lifting itself mightily up, rolling itself along, turning itself over on a great steel pivot, down in Pennsylvania--for its days and nights. I am whirled away from it as from a vision. I am as one who has seen men lifting their souls up in a great flame and laying down floors on a star. I have stood and watched, in the melting-down place, the making and the welding place of the bones of th