Past a town with impressive residences and manufactories with low spreading veils of smoke, they came on a confusion of canals and canal boats, lock dams and bridges, mules and raffish crews with tanned faces and brightly coloured jackets and boots.  Again crossing the river and a shallow, tranquil valley, the train brigade rolled into the main street of Jaffa.  It was a town of small brick dwellings, spaced in orderly yards, echoing to the diminished clamour of the Penny Rolling Mills on the outskirts.  Beyond the walls, starkly red against the snow, the blackened main street, the river was spotted with ice.

Edgar Speever’s wife accepted Eunice with an immediate and unquestioning capability, and Jasper Penny turned away with a momentary but immense relief.  In a few days, after the deed for the possession of the child had been executed, he could place her more permanently.  He walked out to the miscellaneous group of buildings and cluttered yards that held his inherited activity; and in the small single-roomed building of the main office discussed with his superintendent the changes, improvements of process, then under way.  The old nail machines, propelled by the feet and hands of an operator, and producing but one nail at a time, had been replaced by a high power engine, self-heading machinery.  The superintendent complained of the pig from the new hot blast furnaces.  “Impure,” he declared.  “And this new stone coal firing, too, makes but poor stuff.  It’ll never touch the old charcoal forging.  Hammered bar’s at ninety, and I’m glad to get it then.  The puddling furnaces will do something with the grey pig; we have eight in blast now, turning out the railroad and heavier bars.  This year will see forty-five hundred tons of iron worked, and close to four thousand kegs of nails.”

Jasper Penny listened attentively; it was his intention soon to dispense entirely with all the time-honoured methods of iron manufacture.  Water power, with its unequal flow, any large employment of charcoal, growing increasingly expensive with the rapid diminishment of the forests, must give place to the steam blast machine and anthracite.  If his manager was unable to change, develop, with the changing times he would find another, more scientific.

Outside the early twilight made more grey the dingy sheds and buildings, the heaped slag; the long brick rectangle of the rolling mill, with its triple imposed, ventilated roof and the high, smoking stacks of the puddling furnaces, rising four from either length, gave out an undiminished, deafening uproar, the clamour of the bars falling out from the rollers, the spatter of hammers and dull dragging of heavy weights.  The engine of the nail works rent all other sound with an unaccustomed, harsh blast....  Jasper Penny was conscious of a deep, involuntary relief when he reached the comparative tranquillity, the secession of vexatious problems, accomplished by Myrtle Forge.

XIV