frequently and with surest interest? Dress and men. Two
girls in the seaming-room had got into a quarrel that day over a packer,
a fine looking, broad-shouldered fellow who had touched the hearts of
both and awakened in each an emotion she claimed the right to defend.
The quarrel began lightly with an exchange of unpleasant comment; it
soon took the proportions of a dispute which could not give itself the
desired vent in words alone. The boss was called in. He made no attempt
to control what lay beyond his power, but applying factory legislation
to the case, he ordered the two Amazons to "register out" until the
squabble was settled, as the factory did not propose to pay its hands
for the time spent in fights. So the two girls "rang out" past the
timekeeper and took an hour in the open air, hand to hand, fist to fist,
which, as it happens to man, had its calming effect.

We stitched our way industriously over the 7,000 dozen. Except for the
moments when some girl called a message or shouted a conversation,
there was nothing to occupy the mind but the vibrating, pulsing,
pounding of the machinery. The body was shaken with it; the ears
strained.

The little girl opposite me was a new hand. Her rosy cheeks and straight
shoulders announced this fact. She had been five months in the mill; the
other girls around her had been there two years, five years, nine years.
There were 150 of us at the long, narrow tables which filled the room.
By the windows the light and air were fairly good. At the centre tables
the atmosphere was stagnant, the shadows came too soon. The wood's edge
ran within a few yards of the factory windows. Between it and us lay the
stream, the water force, the power that had called men to Perry. There,
as everywhere in America, for an individual as for a place, the
attraction was industrial possibilities. As Niagara has become more an
industrial than a picturesque landscape, so Perry, in spite of its
serene and beautiful surroundings, is a shrine to mechanical force in
whose temple, the tall-chimneyed mill, a human sacrifice is made to the
worshipers of gain.

My _vis-a-vis_ was talkative. "Say," she said to her neighbour, "Jim
Weston is the worst flirt I ever seen."

"Who's Jim Weston?" the other responded, diving into the box by her side
for a handful of gray woolen shirts.

"Why, he's the one who made my teeth--he made teeth for all of us up
home," and her smile reveals the handiwork of Weston.

"If