lothes come out of the
box, followed by books, and more books.

"Books clean to the bottom?" he asked.

Martin nodded, and went on arranging the books on a kitchen table which
served in the room in place of a wash-stand.

"Gee!" Joe exploded, then waited in silence for the deduction to arise in
his brain. At last it came.

"Say, you don't care for the girls--much?" he queried.

"No," was the answer. "I used to chase a lot before I tackled the books.
But since then there's no time."

"And there won't be any time here. All you can do is work an' sleep."

Martin thought of his five hours' sleep a night, and smiled. The room
was situated over the laundry and was in the same building with the
engine that pumped water, made electricity, and ran the laundry
machinery. The engineer, who occupied the adjoining room, dropped in to
meet the new hand and helped Martin rig up an electric bulb, on an
extension wire, so that it travelled along a stretched cord from over the
table to the bed.

The next morning, at quarter-past six, Martin was routed out for a
quarter-to-seven breakfast. There happened to be a bath-tub for the
servants in the laundry building, and he electrified Joe by taking a cold
bath.

"Gee, but you're a hummer!" Joe announced, as they sat down to breakfast
in a corner of the hotel kitchen.

With them was the engineer, the gardener, and the assistant gardener, and
two or three men from the stable. They ate hurriedly and gloomily, with
but little conversation, and as Martin ate and listened he realized how
far he had travelled from their status. Their small mental caliber was
depressing to him, and he was anxious to get away from them. So he
bolted his breakfast, a sickly, sloppy affair, as rapidly as they, and
heaved a sigh of relief when he passed out through the kitchen door.

It was a perfectly appointed, small steam laundry, wherein the most
modern machinery did everything that was possible for machinery to do.
Martin, after a few instructions, sorted the great heaps of soiled
clothes, while Joe started the masher and made up fresh supplies of soft-
soap, compounded of biting chemicals that compelled him to swathe his
mouth and nostrils and eyes in bath-towels till he resembled a mummy.
Finished the sorting, Martin lent a hand in wringing the clothes. This
was done by dumping them into a spinning receptacle that went at a rate
of a few thousand revolutions a minute, tearing the matter from