the southwest of Pittsburgh there lie boundless beds of a peculiar soft coal, in strata eleven feet thick, easily mined, and generally easy of access. This coal, slowly baked in great ovens, is the Connellsville coke of commerce, ninety per cent. carbon-a fuel that finds its way to the blast-furnaces of Lake Champlain, on the east, and to the smelting furnaces of Utah and Colorado on the west. Five thousand coke ovens to-day send their pernicious fumes heavenward, and the nocturnal appearance of a range of coke ovens in full blast so nearly embodies the orthodox idea COKE-BURNING. of Satanic scenery that unregenerate Pittsburghers have comparatively few surprises in store after this life. Before quitting the realms of coal and coke and their river transportation, it might be mentioned that to be consid | ered a coal king, from a Pittsburgh standpoint, one must have at least a million dollars invested in lands and pits, and boats and landings, and mules and what not. One Pittsburgh firm there is with $6,000,000 so invested, another with $4,000,000, half a dozen with $2,000,000, and at least a dozen with $1,000,000. All these solid gentlemen are of the "self-made" order, and not a few rather glory in the fact that they have carried the lamp and swung the pick in their pre-millionaire days. But it is as the City of Iron that Pittsburgh must go down into remotest fututy. She is the Smoky City only because of her forest of chimneys, whose tongues of flame speak of fires within that are boiling or melting the metal that gives the name to the age in which we live. Your true Pittsburgher glories in his city's name, in her wealth, and, generally speaking, in her dirt. Her densest smoke is incense in his nostrils, and his face brightens when, in approaching the grimy burg of his nativity, he sights her nimbus of carbon from afar, or, after night-fall, her crown of fire, and the stranger soon learns to understand this feel ing. The great Iron City's mills and her wonderful furnaces are inspiring to the dullest. One-twelfth of all the pig-iron produced in the United States is wrested from the glistening ore by the furnaces of Pittsburgh and her immediate vicinity. In the matter of blastfurnaces her record dates back to 1792, when steel, until lately supplied by the English manufacturers. In this Pittsburgh excels, and makes two-thirds of all the crucible steel produced in this country. In these statistics there is, perforce, much dryness, save for the Pittsburgher. But in the creating of steel there is evolved such novel beauty as makes the sooty interior of a Pittsburgh steel-works a feast to the dullest eye. Visit, for instance, some of the largest and most representative establishments. In one of these electricity has recently been introduced to illuminate the works. Here, after night-fall, the livid light of thirty-two electric lamps gives the glare of the furnaces a gory hue. The A BLAST-FURNACE. the primitive structure erected by George | brawny forms of negro puddlers glow in Anshutz sent its smoke into the clear sky, now darkened by the warm breath of fifteen huge furnaces, capable of producing half a million tons of pig-metal every year from the ores that come from far and near. And to further prepare this metal-the first result of fire upon ore-there are in Pittsburgh thirty-five rolling-mills, wherein eight hundred boiling or puddling furnaces are seething like miniature volcanoes in constant eruption, and whose product is here fashioned into one-quarter of all the rolled iron made in the broad republic. Ascending into the realm of steel-that perfected, purified form reached through these crucial boilings and meltings and hammerings-Pittsburgh claims, with pardonable pride, sixteen enormous establishments devoted to making all manner of steel, including the finest grades of "tool" the light of the pools of liquid metal they stir. In this labor they summon from space about the mill deepest shadows that wage a warring conflict with dazzling beams of light. Dante, in conceiving his "Inferno," must have had in mind just such a scene as is witnessed nightly in the crucible department of a Pittsburgh steelworks. Just below the surface of the floor are seen, amid lambent flames of glowing gas, the amphora-like outlines of the crucibles. These, composed of clay and plumbago, withstand a heat of 4000° Fahrenheit, and contain the molten steel that must be poured into waiting openmouthed moulds. In the men assigned this labor human endurance seems certainly to have reached its limit. The steelmelter, grasping such a pair of tongs as might have been used upon St. Dunstan, steps directly over the fiery pit below, seizes a crucible, and, with apparent ease, draws it, cherry red, to the surface. Man and glowing jar seem part and parcel, and equally impervious to the fearful heat. Salamander muscles come into graceful play as the melter beheads the sealed crucible, which he tilts slowly until its contents are decanted, amid vivid coruscations, into the mould. In raiment the melter from his waist down is an Esquimau, from his waist up a Hottentot, a Zulu, or anything innocent of clothing. Many professional men of liberal education would gladly earn the salary paid the Pittsburgh steel-melter, but the eye STEEL-WORKS-PUDDLING. witness of the latter's ordeal will willingly concede that his salary is being eminently well earned. In other portions of such an establishment is seen the progress of the cast-steel ingot toward the finished rod, or bar, soon converts the shapeless mass into a or sheet. Overhead runs the single rail solid block of wrought steel. On every of a miniature "elevated railway," af- hand is seen the wonderful co-operation fording rapid transit by means of pendent of ponderous perfected machinery with carriers for glowing, pulpy balls of steel trained muscle. Particularly is this the from furnace to Gothic-framed steam- case at the smaller hammers, where the hammers. Here a touch upon a lever hammer-man, in a swinging seat, times and an earthquake is born, while the Ti- the turning of his rod of steel to the quick tanic dance of the five-ton hammer-head stroke of the hammer so skillfully that the FROM THE PULPIT. globe. Relapsing into statistics, it may be said of this furnace (known as "B") that in the month of May, 1880, it produced in seven days 1141 tons of pig-metal, a single day's product being 184 tons. Thus does this big busy "B" improve the hours, shining and nocturnal, on the spot where Braddock received his deathwound a century and a quarter ago. But to the stranger the triumphs of furnace "B" seem possessed of far interest than the pyrotechnical wonders of the "converting-house." In the bewildering precincts of this place, fire, air, and water are in harness, and do their master-man's-bidding submissively, but in a way that appalls. Air, at a pressure of twenty-five pounds to the square inch, enters an enormous receptacle, the "converter," that, swinging on trunnions, like a great cannon, is pointing skyward. In this poised vessel eight tons of molten iron are seething and bub finished surface is smooth and burnished | less In Pittsburgh's coronet of flame there are many brilliants, but her youngest steelmaking enterprise holds the position of a central crown diamond. This occupies a portion of the site of General Braddock's defeat in 1755. Here is found one of the most perfect Bessemer "plants" in the world, and here also stands a blast-furnace with a record unequalled in the |