watch them rising against the sky without walls of any kind. The steel network supports the building and the walls are merely a shell to be hung to this later on. And so we see these buildings with their walls beginning at the fourth floor and with the iron skeleton below entirely open. The steel buildings, however, are not the first to be built in this way, although the idea of doing so originated in America. The steel skyscraper is, after all, the outgrowth of the old American frame house. Ordinarily a building rests upon its walls; the old-time frame house was held up by its frame, and the walls, whether they were the shingles or clapboards, were nailed on afterward. The quaint old-fashioned houses of a century ago would probably not claim to be relations of the gigantic steel buildings of today, though the family resemblance is unmistakable.

Building, putting materials together for new uses, is one of the oldest and still one of the most important vocations of man. Think of the houses, roads, bridges, factories, stores, office buildings, and enormous machines of a thousand sorts which are built or used annually in every community. This story of the skyscraper illustrates what goes on in many kinds of buildings. A modern skyscraper requires the labor of the workmen who put the materials together, the architect and engineers who plan it, and thousands of others who in distant places work to prepare raw materials for the builders'

use.

Trace a piece of iron ore from the mine through all the processes of preparation until it is placed in the building.

THE SKYSCRAPER1

CARL SANDBURG

By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul.

Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys.

It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories.

(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?)

Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out. Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell

terrors and profits and loves-curses of men, grappling plans of business, and questions of women in plots of love.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet.

Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors.

Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted. Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it.

1 Copyrighted by Henry Holt and Company. Used by permission of the publishers.

Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words;

And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.

Souls of them all are here, even the hod-carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the bricklayer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk. (One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge - he is here - his soul has gone into the stones of the building.)

On the office doors from tier to tier-hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life.

Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room.

Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation

officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth.

Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building.

Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women, who go away and eat and come back to work.

Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them.

One by one the floors are emptied.

men are gone. Pails clang.

The uniformed elevator Scrubbers work, talking

in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day.

Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight.

Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds.
Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors.
Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets.
Steel safes

stand in corners. Money is stacked in them. A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

1. What gives the skyscraper its soul?

2. From where do the inhabitants of the building come?

3. Make an outline of the poem by writing a phrase or a sentence for each stanza.

4. When is the skyscraper most interesting to you?

5. Which do you like better, the story by Collins or the poem by Sandburg? Can you tell why?

MEASURING YOUR READING ABILITY

Secure a copy of the Haggerty Reading Examination, Sigma 3, Form A. Ask the teacher or someone else to keep the exact time while you read the directions and do what they tell you to do. The booklet of directions for the test will show you how to mark your answers and will give you a table of norms with which to compare your score.

After completing the scoring of your test, answer these questions:

1. Are you a good reader?

2. What is your reading grade?

3. What is your reading age?

4. What can you do to improve your reading ability?

HOW VALUABLE IS THE INFORMATION GAINED FROM A. SELECTION?

Scale E is intended as a device to help you estimate the value of the information you gained from reading.

Think of this line as a yardstick with which to measure the value of the information you gain from reading a selection. If the information seems to you very valuable, as much as that gained from any reading which you have done, you may place the cross above the plus 3 at the right end of the line. If the selection seems to you to contain no information of worth, to be really valueless from the standpoint of information, then place the cross above the minus 3 at the left end of the line. If the information gained seems of moderate worth, place the cross above the zero at the middle of the line. Plus I would mean that the story contains information of more than average value and plus 2 would mean that it contains very important information but that it does not equal the best selections you have read.

DIRECTIONS

In your notebook draw lines for each selection in the section on CONQUERING NATURE as indicated here.