TALE OF A SKY-SCRAPER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1080, 27 March 1913, Page 4

TALE OF A SKY-SCRAPER.

Human nature becomes callous to the daily association with peril. But now and then something tears away the callous spot and leaves the raw, naked nerves exposed. There is a structural steel worker who was once one of the most daring ‘‘cowboys of the air.” No money now would tempt him to go aloft, says the New York Tribune.

The man tells his story as follows “A year ago I was setting steel on the thirtieth storey of one of the record-breaking skyscrapers. At the noon hour when I went below for lunch a little Maltese kitten strolled up and made friends. I divided up the meat from one of my sandwiches with pussy. There was a pink ribbon on its neck —Eve hated pink ever since. Funny, isn’t it ? It was the prettiest, cutest little mite of a cat I ever saw. My little girl had cried for a kitten that morning, and this looked like the very thing. “When the lunch hour was over, and I had to go swinging up the thirtieth storey, I tucked the purring ball of fur into my jacket pocket. When we reached the top I got a piece of string, tied one end in the pink ribbon and the othpr to a brace in an out-of-the-way corner, where I made a bed for Miss Kitt with my packet, and left her there.

“I was pretty busy that afternoon, and forgot all about the kitty. Along towards quitting time I happened to look up and saw that tiny thing, the ribbon off its neck, running towards me over the beams. It didn’t mind the height, but instead came trotting along unsuspectingly ip the most, friendly, playful fashion. “I was standing opt towards the end of the girder, waiting for another huge mass of steel to be swung into place. A gap of about four feet separated the beam on which I was standing from the one on which the kitten was approaching. Beneath the opening there was nothing but a straight drop of some three hundred feet. I called to pussy to stay where she was and I’d come to her; but instead, when she came opposite she crouched qpfl sprang. t‘A? she did so, her feet slipped ou the smooth steel. I saw it, and grabbed—grabbed just in time to feel a pinch of fur that I caught between my finger and thumb slip out of tny grasp. I stared downward, and saw the poor little mite turn over and over, and land at the bottom. It made me sick. A moment before, and the dizziest height was as safe as the sidewalk. I lay down flat on the girder, for the first time in my life, thinking it would pass. I didn’t dare open my eyes. The boys carried me down on a hoist, I’ve never been aloft on the steel sines.” Structural steelworkers run many chances of losing their nerve—“dropping their goats,” they call it. Only the other day one of them who had never known fear was standing on the quter edge of a lofty steel framework, and chanced to look down into the street. He saw a trolley car run over a newsboy. Instantly his mind was swamped with thoughts of death.. He stretched [himself flat on the besm, and crawled to an island of planking. When a man once does that on top of a skyscraper he has finished his high work. “They never come back,” said an old foreman. “It’s a pity, too, for they can never get a quarter the pay at another job that they did at this before they looked down and saw death.” Much of the world’s work is done by meu who have to keep their nerve in face of peril. Sometimes a man will not go to pieces until after a long run qf danger. Primarily the cause may be tatigue, or bad liver, or bad nerves j but when it is all over he decides be has had enough, and seeks another vocation.