reat workroom. In and out among the aisles and
labyrinthine passages that wind through towering piles of boxes, from
the thundering machinery far over on the other side of the "loft" to the
dusky recess of the uttermost table, the musical cry reverberated.

"Hot a--i--r!" Every few minutes, all through the long, weary day,
Phoebe found occasion for sounding that magic call.

"The rest of the ladies get up their backs something awful," Phoebe
explained as she dragged a big green pasteboard box from beneath the
work-table. "They say she gives me more 'n my share of learners because
I'm easy to get on with, I guess, and don't play no tricks on them....
You have a right to put your things in here along with my lunch. Them
girls is like to do 'most anything to a new girl's duds if you wuz to
hang them in the coat-room. Them Ginneys 'll do 'most anything. Wuz you
down-stairs when Celie Polatta got into the fight with Rosie?"

"I just missed it," she sighed in reply to my affirmative. "I was born
unlucky."

"Hello, Phoebe! So you've hogged another!" a new voice called across the
table, and I put a question.

"Why do they all want to teach the new girl? I should think they'd be
glad to be rid of the trouble."

"You mean _learn_ her? Why, because the girl that learns the green hand
gets all her work checked on to her own card while she's learning how.
Never worked in a box-factory before?" I shook my head.

"I guessed as much. Well, box-making's a good trade. Have you an apron?"

As I had not, I was then ordered to "turn my skirt," in order that I
might receive the inevitable coat of glue and paste on its inner rather
than on its outer surface. I gently demurred against this very slovenly
expedient.

"All right; call it hot air if you want to. I s'pose you know it all,"
tossing her curl-papers with scorn. "You know better 'n me, of course.
Most learners do think they knows it all. Now looky here, I've been here
six years, and I've learned lots of green girls, and I never had one as
didn't think she hadn't ought to turn her skirt. The ladies I'm used to
working with likes to walk home looking decent and respectable, no
difference what they're like other times."

With the respectability of my ladyhood thus impeached, and lest I
infringe upon the cast-iron code of box-factory etiquette, there was
nothing to do but yield. I unhooked my skirt, dropped it to the floor,
and stepped out of it in a trice, anxious to do anythin