The hearths, set in a row beyond the anvil, had at their back an
obscure, mechanical stir, accompanied by the audible suction of squat,
drum bellows. The labour was halted at a fire; half naked anatomies,
herculean shoulders and incredible arms, gathered about its mouth with
hooked bars. An incandescent mass was lifted, born, rayed in an
intolerable white heat, into the air. A hammer was swung upon it; and,
as if the metal were sentient, a violet radiance scintillated where the
blow had fallen. The pasty iron was carried to the anvil, the hooks
dropped for wide-jawed tongs; the trip hammer moved up and fell. The
hardening metal darkened to a carnation from which chips scattered like
gorgeous petals. The carnation faded under ringing blows; the petals,
heaping in the penumbra under foot, were as vividly blue as gentians.
The colour vanished from the solidifying bloom ... It was ashen, black.
The hammering continued.
A sense of the vast and antique simplicity of the forging, a feeling of
hammering the earth itself into the superior purposes of man, enveloped
Howat. He forgot for the moment his companion, lost in a swelling pride
of Myrtle Forge, of his father's fibre--the iron of his character like
the iron he successfully wrought.
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