steel.  Once more the “vessels” are lowered and made to discharge their contents.  First comes a molten cascade of basic slag which is borne away to cool, then to be ground to finest powder, before its quickening power is given to pasture and cornfield, imparting a deeper purple to the clover and a mellower gold to the rippling ears of wheat.  When all the slag has been drawn off, there is a moment’s pause, and then a new cascade begins.  The steel is beginning to flow, not in a daffodil stream like the slag, but in a cascade of exquisite turquoise blue, melting away at the sides into iridescent opal.  Sometimes a great cloud of steam from the pit below passes across the mouth of the crucible, and then the torrent of molten steel takes on all the colours of the rainbow, and the great shed, with its alert, swiftly moving figures, is suffused with a radiance of unearthly beauty.

When the vessels have discharged all their precious liquid, the cauldron into which the metal has been poured is swung in mid-air by that unseen, effortless power which we know as hydraulic pressure, through the arc of a wide circle, until it reaches the point where the great ingot-moulds stand ready to receive the molten steel.  Then the cauldron is tapped, and once more the stream of turquoise flows forth, until the ladle is empty and the moulds are filled to the brim with liquid fire.  Such was the work in which Job Hesketh was engaged, and it absorbed him body and soul from year’s end to year’s end.

Job was a giant in stature and strength.  Born on a farm in the very heart of the Yorkshire wolds, he had drifted, as a boy of sixteen, to Leeds, and had found the life and activities of the forge as congenial as those of the farmstead.  He had reached the age of fifty without knowing a day’s illness, and he would have been the first to admit that fortune had smiled on him.  His home life had been smooth, his wages had been sufficient for his simple needs, and the good health that he enjoyed was shared by his wife and five children.  It is true that, in spite of his long years of service, he had never risen to be a foreman; but that, he knew quite well, was his own fault.  During the summer months his conduct at the forge was exemplary, but as soon as November set in it was another matter.  Fox-hunting was the passion of his life, and with the fall of the leaf in the last days of October, Job grew restless.  He would eagerly scan the papers for news of the doings of the Bramham Moor Hunt, and from the opening of the season to its close he would play truant on at least one day a week.  He knew every cover for leagues around, and thought nothing of tramping six or eight miles to be ready for the meet before following the hounds and huntsman all day on foot across the stubble fields.  In vain did foremen and works-managers remonstrate with him; he promised to reform, but never kept his word.  The blood of many generations of wold farmers ran in his veins, and everyone of