e one cannot hear even the sound of
its own voice--in the roar of the thousand-throated Thing which
drives the Steel Beast on.

Seven o'clock--eight o'clock--Shiloh's head swam--her shoulders
ached, her ears quivered with sensitiveness, and seemed not to catch
sounds any more, but sharp and shooting pains. She was dazed already
and weak; but still the Steam Thing cheered its steel legions on.

Up and down, up and down she walked, her baby thoughts coming to her
as through the roar of a Niagara, through pain and sensitiveness,
through aches and a dull, never-ending sameness.

Nine o'clock! Oh, she was so tired of it all!

Hark, she thought she heard a bird sing in a far off, dreamy way, and
for a moment she made mud pies in the back yard of the hut on the
mountain, under the black-oak in the yard, with the glint of soft
sunshine over everything and the murmur of green leaves in the trees
above, as the wind from off the mountain went through them, and the
anemone, and bellworts, and daisies grew beneath and around. Was it a
bluebird? She had never seen but one and it had built its nest in a
hole in a hollow tree, the summer before she went into the mill to
work.

She listened again--yes, it did sound something like a bluebird,
peeping in a distant far off way, such as she had heard in the cabin
on the mountain before she had ever heard the voice of the Big Thing
at the mill. She listened, and a wave of disappointment swept over
her baby face; for, listening closely, she found it was an unoiled
separator, that peeped in a bluebird way now and then, above the
staccato of some rusty spindle.

But in the song of that bluebird and the glory of an imaginary mud
pie, all the disappointment of what she had missed swept over her.

Ten o'clock--the little fingers throbbed and burned, the tiny legs
were stiff and tired, the little head seemed as a block of wood, but
still the Steam Thing took no thought of rest.

Eleven o'clock--oh, but to rest awhile! To rest under the trees in
the yard, for the sunshine looked so warm and bright out under the
mill-windows, and the memory of that bluebird's song, though but an
imitation, still echoed in her ear. And those mud pies!--she saw them
all around her and in such lovely bits of old broken crockery
and--....

She felt a rude punch in the side. It was Jud Carpenter standing over
her and pointing to where a frowzled broken thread was tangling
itself around a separator. She had dre