and a jerk of one
hand up, and the other down, the eye riveted to the nicety of a
hair's breadth, the stroke downward gauged to the cup of a thimble,
to settle over the point of the spindle's end; for the missing of a
thread's breadth would send a spindle blade through the hand, or
tangle and snap a thread which was turning with a thousand
revolutions in a minute.

_Snap--bang! Snap--bang!_ One hundred and twenty
times--_Snap--bang!_ and back again, went the deft little workers
pushing their cart before them.

Full at last, their cart is whirled away with flying heels to another
machine.

It was a steady, lightning, endless track. Their little trained
fingers betook of their surroundings and worked like fingers of
steel. Their legs seemed made of India rubber. Their eyes shot out
right and left, left and right, looking for the broken threads on the
whirling bobbins as hawks sweep over the marsh grass looking for
mice, and the steel claws, which swooped down on the bobbins when
they found it, made the simile not unsuitable.

Young as she was, Shiloh managed one of these harnessed, fiery lines
of dancing witches, pirouetting on boards of hardened oak or hickory.
Up and down she walked--up and down, watching these endless whirling
figures, her bare fingers pitted against theirs of brass, her bare
feet against theirs shod with iron, her little head against theirs
insensate and unpitying, her little heart against theirs of flame
which throbbed in the boiler's bosom and drove its thousand steeds
with a whip of fire.

In the bloodiest and cruelest days of the Roman Empire, man was
matched against wild beasts. But in the man's hand was the blade of
his ancestors and over his breast the steel ribs which had helped his
people to conquer the world.

And in the Beast's body was a heart!

Ay, and the man was a man--a trained gladiator--and he was nerved by
the cheers of thousands of sympathizing spectators.

And now, centuries after, and in the age of so-called kindness, comes
this battle to be fought over. And the fight, now as then, is for
bread and life.

But how cruelly unfair is the fight of to-day, when the weak and
helpless child is made the gladiator, and the fight is for bread, and
the Beast is of steel and steam, and is soulless and heartless.
Steel--that by which the old gladiator conquered--that is the heart
of the Thing the little one must fight. And the cheers--the glamour
of it is lacking, for the littl