At night the scene from the Highlands is even more spectacular, for at brief intervals the blowing of a converter in some distant steel plant illuminates the heavens with a great hot glow, like that which rises and falls about the crater of a volcano in eruption.  Thus the city’s vast affairs are kept before it by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire.  Iron and steel dominate Birmingham’s mind, activities and life.  The very ground of Red Mountain is red because of the iron ore that it contains, and those who reside upon the charming slopes of this hill do not own their land in fee simple, but subject always to the mineral rights of mining companies.

The only other industry of Birmingham which is to be compared, in magnitude or efficiency, with the steel industry is that of “cutting in” at dances.  All through the South it is carried on, but whereas in such cities as Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta, men show a little mercy to the stranger—­realizing that, as he is presumably unacquainted with all the ladies at a dance, he cannot retaliate in kind—­Birmingham is merciless and prosecutes the pestilential practice unremittingly, even going so far as to apply the universal-service principle and call out her highschool youths to carry on the work.  Before I went to certain dances in Birmingham I felt that high-school boys ought to be kept at home at night, but after attending these dances I realized that such restriction was altogether inadequate, and that the only way to deal with them effectively would be to pickle them in vitriol.

Where, in other cities of the South, I have managed to dance as much as half a dance without interruption, I never danced more than twenty feet with one partner in Birmingham.  Nor did my companion.

Our host was energetic in presenting us to ladies of infinite pulchritude and State-wide terpsichorean reputation, but we would start to tread a measure with them, only to have them swiftly snatched from us by some spindle-necked, long-wristed, big-boned, bowl-eared high-school youth, in a dinner suit which used to fit him when it was new, six months ago.

As we would start to dance the lady would say: 

“You-all ah strangehs, ahn’t you?”

We would reply that we were.

“Wheh do you come from?”

“New York.”

Then, because the Hardware Convention was being held in town at the time, she would continue: 

“Ah reckon you-all ah hahdware men?”

But that was as far as the conversation ever got.  Just about the time that she began to reckon we were hardware men a mandatory hand would be laid upon us, and before we had time to defend ourselves against the hardware charge, the lady would be wafted off in the arms of some predatory youth who ought to have been at home considering pons asinorum.

Had we indeed been hardware men, and had we had our hardware with us, they could have done with fewer teachers in the high schools of that city after the night of our first dance in Birmingham.