essed, even if
the stroke that summons is the mill whistle.

As we troop to work in the dawn, we leave behind us the desert-like
town; all day it drowses, haunted by a few figures of old age and
infirmity--but the mill is alive! We have given up, in order to satisfy
its appetite, all manner of flesh and blood, and the gentlest morsel
between its merciless jaws is the little child.

So long as I am part of its food and triumph I will study the mill.

Leaving the line of flashing, whirling spools, I lean against the green
box full of cotton refuse and regard the giant room.

It is a wonderful sight. The mill itself, a model of careful,
well-considered building, has every facility for the best and most
advantageous manufacture of textiles. The fine frames of the intricate
"warping," the well-placed frames of the "drawing-in" all along the
window sides of the rooms; then lines upon lines of spool frames. Great
piles of stuff lie here and there in the room. It is early--"all the
yarn ain't come yet." Two children whose work has not been apportioned
lie asleep against a cotton bale. The terrible noise, the grinding,
whirling, pounding, the gigantic burr renders other senses keen. By my
side works a little girl of eight. Her brutal face, already bespeaking
knowledge of things childhood should ignore, is surrounded by a forest
of yellow hair. She goes doggedly at her spools, grasping them sullenly.
She walks well on her bare, filthy feet. Her hands and arms are no
longer flesh colour, but resemble weather-roughened hide, ingrained with
dirt. Around the tangle of her hair cotton threads and bits of lint make
a sort of aureole. (Her nimbus of labour, if you will!) There is nothing
saint-like in that face, nor in the loose-lipped mouth, whence exudes a
black stain of snuff as between her lips she turns the root she chews.

"She's a mean girl," my little companion says; "we-all don't hev nothin'
to say to her."

"Why?"

"Her maw hunts her to the mill; she don't want to go--no, sir--so she's
mad most the time."

Thus she sets her dogged resistance in scowling black looks, in quick,
frantic gestures and motions against the machinery that claims her
impotent childhood. The nimbus around her furze of hair remains; there
are other heads than saints--there are martyrs! Let the child wear her
crown.

Through the looms I catch sight of Upton's, my landlord's, little
child. She is seven; so small that they have a box for her to s