ob. Measles was the cause of it.
After he recovered, he got work in a glass factory. The pay was better,
and the work demanded skill. It was piecework, and the more skilful
he was, the bigger wages he earned. Here was incentive. And under this
incentive he developed into a remarkable worker.

It was simple work, the tying of glass stoppers into small bottles. At
his waist he carried a bundle of twine. He held the bottles between his
knees so that he might work with both hands. Thus, in a sitting position
and bending over his own knees, his narrow shoulders grew humped and his
chest was contracted for ten hours each day. This was not good for the
lungs, but he tied three hundred dozen bottles a day.

The superintendent was very proud of him, and brought visitors to look
at him. In ten hours three hundred dozen bottles passed through his
hands. This meant that he had attained machine-like perfection. All
waste movements were eliminated. Every motion of his thin arms, every
movement of a muscle in the thin fingers, was swift and accurate. He
worked at high tension, and the result was that he grew nervous. At
night his muscles twitched in his sleep, and in the daytime he could
not relax and rest. He remained keyed up and his muscles continued
to twitch. Also he grew sallow and his lint-cough grew worse. Then
pneumonia laid hold of the feeble lungs within the contracted chest, and
he lost his job in the glass-works.

Now he had returned to the jute mills where he had first begun with
winding bobbins. But promotion was waiting for him. He was a good
worker. He would next go on the starcher, and later he would go into the
loom room. There was nothing after that except increased efficiency.

The machinery ran faster than when he had first gone to work, and his
mind ran slower. He no longer dreamed at all, though his earlier years
had been full of dreaming. Once he had been in love. It was when he
first began guiding the cloth over the hot roller, and it was with the
daughter of the superintendent. She was much older than he, a young
woman, and he had seen her at a distance only a paltry half-dozen times.
But that made no difference. On the surface of the cloth stream that
poured past him, he pictured radiant futures wherein he performed
prodigies of toil, invented miraculous machines, won to the mastership
of the mills, and in the end took her in his arms and kissed her soberly
on the brow.

But that was all in the long ag