"I was younger'n him when I started to work."

Johnny's mouth was open, further to express the sense of unfairness that
he felt, but the mouth closed with a snap. He turned gloomily on his
heel and stalked into the house and to bed. The door of his room
was open to let in warmth from the kitchen. As he undressed in the
semi-darkness he could hear his mother talking with a neighbour woman
who had dropped in. His mother was crying, and her speech was punctuated
with spiritless sniffles.

"I can't make out what's gittin' into Johnny," he could hear her say.
"He didn't used to be this way. He was a patient little angel.

"An' he is a good boy," she hastened to defend. "He's worked faithful,
an' he did go to work too young. But it wasn't my fault. I do the best I
can, I'm sure."

Prolonged sniffling from the kitchen, and Johnny murmured to himself as
his eyelids closed down, "You betcher life I've worked faithful."

The next morning he was torn bodily by his mother from the grip of
sleep. Then came the meagre breakfast, the tramp through the dark, and
the pale glimpse of day across the housetops as he turned his back on
it and went in through the factory gate. It was another day, of all the
days, and all the days were alike.

And yet there had been variety in his life--at the times he changed from
one job to another, or was taken sick. When he was six, he was little
mother and father to Will and the other children still younger. At seven
he went into the mills--winding bobbins. When he was eight, he got work
in another mill. His new job was marvellously easy. All he had to do was
to sit down with a little stick in his hand and guide a stream of cloth
that flowed past him. This stream of cloth came out of the maw of a
machine, passed over a hot roller, and went on its way elsewhere. But he
sat always in one place, beyond the reach of daylight, a gas-jet flaring
over him, himself part of the mechanism.

He was very happy at that job, in spite of the moist heat, for he was
still young and in possession of dreams and illusions. And wonderful
dreams he dreamed as he watched the steaming cloth streaming endlessly
by. But there was no exercise about the work, no call upon his mind,
and he dreamed less and less, while his mind grew torpid and drowsy.
Nevertheless, he earned two dollars a week, and two dollars represented
the difference between acute starvation and chronic underfeeding.

But when he was nine, he lost his j