o strongly? 'Jump into the river!' That's saying a
lot!"

"I am sick of the shoe-shops."

"How long have you been at this work?"

"Ten years. When you have worked ten years in Lynn you will be sick of
the shops."

I was sick of the shops, and I had not worked ten years. And for my
hard-toiling future, such as she imagined that it would be, I could see
that she pitied me. Once, supposing that since I am so green and so
ill-clad, and so evidently bent on learning my trade the best I knew,
she asked me in a voice quick with sisterhood:

"Say, are you hungry?"

"No, no, no."

"You'll be all right! No American girl need to starve in America."

In the shops the odours are more easily endured than is the noise. All
conversation is shrieked out, and all the vision that one has as one
lifts one's eyes from time to time is a sky seen through dirty
window-panes, distant chimney-pots, and the roof-lines of like houses of
toil.

* * * * *

I gathered this from our interrupted talk that flowed unceasingly
despite the noise of our hammers and the noise of the general room.

They worked at a trade uncongenial. Not one had a good word to say for
shop-labour there, despite its advantages, in this progressive land of
generous pay. Each woman in a narrow, touching degree was a dreamer.
Housework! too servile; but then, compared to shopwork it was leisure.

By four the gas was lit here and there where burners were available.
Over our heads was no arrangement for lighting. We bent lower in
semi-obscurity. In the blending of twilight and gaslight the room became
mysterious, a shadowy corridor. Figures grew indistinct, softened and
blurred. The exhausted air surrounded the gas jets in misty circles.

Unaltered alone was the ceaseless thud, the chopping, pounding of the
machinery, the long soughing of the power-engine.

Here and there a woman stops to rest a second, her head sunk in her
hand; or she rises, stretches limbs and body. A man wanders in from the
next room, a pipe in his mouth, or a bad cigar, and pausing by one of
the pale operators, whose space of rest is done, he flings down in front
of her a new pile of piece-work from the cutting machines.

We are up five flights of stairs. There are at least two hundred girls.
Machine oil, rags, refuse, cover the floor--such _debris_ as only awaits
a spark from a lighted match or cigar to burst into flames. Despite laws
and regulations the build