winds up her letters and puts on the close felt bonnet which protects her hair from smoke and sparks, that she steps over to that glass to adjust the bonnet.

She is off for her everyday inspection now. Never a day, except during her summer vacation, does she miss it; never a man is hired or fired, never a debated point settled, never a happening of any importance occurs about the plant, but she attends to it herself. She'll stop every few minutes to investigate why that pattern isn't finished, or how that sand came to be too moist, or who left a sheet of paper where the sparks might fall on it.

"The place is just as it was built seventy years ago," she proudly informed me. "You see, there's no anvil in America as old as ours. Mark Fisher worked out his own process of welding the steel face on to iron so it would make a dead anvil, and when he died his son, Clark Fisher - that was my husband

and took up the work here, and the plant has been turning out dead anvils ever since. We are making them in these modern days for trade schools and locomotive works and shipyards and every kind of work that needs an anvil. We are still sending them everywhere - China has them, and Argentine, and Constantinople, and that big eight-hundredpounder you saw being cast just now is going to Russia. We are proud - haven't we a right to be? We sometimes say that the proudest thing of all is the fact that the tools that built the Panama Canal were hammered on our anvils."

"And who is we?" you may inquire as I did.

"Well," Mrs. Andrew admits, "I guess we is I."

would not be able to resume supervision of the factory. The work was apparently about to collapse.

Next day his wife went down to the plant. She had always been interested in it, as a spectator, and had spent much time there. "Where are the men?" she demanded.

home

- they thought

"They went the plant - wouldn't run the foreman. “། didn't go!" put in the voice of the shipping clerk.

Mrs. Fisher looked them over. "So you boys are the only ones that stood on the burning deck!" she observed. "Then your job will be to get the rest back here as quick as their legs can bring them."

When the men were all gathered she stood up before them. She was young, she was inexperienced, she was not, in those days, the Iron Woman. Titters went around.

"This plant is going right on," she announced. "And, since my husband can't, I'll run it."

The titters came as near being guffaws as they dared, and there was nudging and whispering. The young woman flushed

-" stammered

MASTERING A PROCESS

AS SHE HAS MASTERED EVERY DETAIL OF THE BUSINESS, BY LEARNING TO DO IT HERSELF

purple, but she said not another word, day. except, "Take your places."

She had only a superficial knowledge of any part of the work, but she made up her mind in that instant to give a demonstration which should take instantaneous effect. She knew that the whole future hung on the drastic measure of the present. Straight forward, then, Mrs. Fisher marched, caught up and pushed ahead of

She rolled the truck

straight up to the anvil she had selected, and, with well-feigned ease, lifted it unconcernedly upon the truck and trundled it off. Mrs. Fisher was to have little trouble from that day. She had said that the plant would run and that she would run

it, and the men's sneers faded very rapidly as they watched her make good her boast.

She admits herself that there was considerable bluff about those first days. She knew less about the various operations than she appeared to. But she did not ask questions of the workmen. She watched them. Back home at night, she questioned her husband about the puzzling details of the

tools herself, works for an hour by the clock, and then shows him that she has done what she called an hour's work for him. She has assigned every task in her plant by this method; has tried it for herself; and claims that a man's output of work should meet hers. It brings them to terms. Not a man will admit that a woman's accomplishment is too heavy for him.

Clark Fisher lived for five years, but he was never able to resume charge of the plant. It is now nine years since he died, nine years that his widow has been totally alone in the ownership of the plant, although her supervision of it dates back fourteen years. She has an output four times as great as he ever reached.

I saw her take a man from the moldingroom one day and shift him over to the machine shop. "Dock'll give you a lesson," she said, lightly. "It won't do

you any harm to fill in a spare hour finding out how to run the planing machine."

The fellow was a long, lean young foreigner who had loafed, sulking, as we entered. Now he brightened with interest. The Iron Woman was passing on to other discussions, but I stopped her.

"How does it happen that you take a man from the foundry and flip him over to the machine shop without warning?" I asked.

She laughed. "It's the way I keep men from becoming machines," she said. "Monotony is one of the worst developments of modern industry. That man has been moody for a week. He loafs all the time. Over and over I cure discontent this way. It doesn't agree with me to do the same thing all the timewhy should it agree with a workman? Mental indigestion results. Try a change. Maybe that man hasn't enough skill bottled up in him to work in the machine

shop, but the men there will gladly try him out and give him a chance."

Two weeks later I saw him again and his moodiness was cured. Moreover, he had shown enough ability in the machine shop to be given a place there some day.

But she has still a better way to stimulate flagging interest. She makes every man play a part in the game. She never reduces them to blind and dumb parts of the mechanism. She "keeps something ahead of them," as she phrases it. The Government has ordered four hundred anvils. "That is a great order for us," she cries, "let's all pitch in and fill it on time!" and immediately there is a new enthusiasm and energy in their work.

Standing on the scaffold of the cupola, she has overlooked the work of her foundry for fourteen years and she has worked out theories of her own-theories which have turned out to be practical. She watched She watched men carrying molten iron at a hit-or-miss pace, slopping it over and ending in the hospital. "When I went to a gymnasium in my girlhood we were taught to carry buckets of water while we chanted 'leftright, left-right,"" she said. She gave the men a drill. You can hear that undertone of "left-right, left-right" in the molding room to-day, and the hot liquid

does not spill now. "What I knew about making a kitchen fire burn taught me to run the cupola," she says. "It is what you have learned everywhere applied to the matter in hand that makes success. That's horse-sense."

It was this "horse-sense," incidentally, that prompted her to buy a farm, run her own dairy, raise her own poultry and vegetables. "I can come out here all used up with some fuss over freight rates or advertising, and it straightens me out in five minutes to milk a cow."

And combined with her favorite "horsesense" is her process of humanizing the relation between employer and employee; she enters into her men's interests, she draws them into hers. She and her methods are worth studying because they are a success. That is why big conventions of manufacturers want her in their discussions. They know that she has won out, and in a day when competition is keen and labor is beset with complications. She likes to tell you that in all the years of the plant's existence it has never shut down, never missed a pay day, never known a strike. A boss whose men stay by her after a quarter-century of contented labor has something of interest to say to employers.