amed but a minute--half a dozen
threads had broken.

It was a rude punch and it hurt her side and frightened her. With a
snarl and a glare he passed on while Shiloh flew to her bobbin.

This fright made her work the next hour with less fatigue. But she
could not forget the song of the bluebird, and once, when Appomattox
looked at her, she was working her mouth in a song,--a Sunday School
song she had picked up at the Bishop's church. Appomattox could not
hear it--no one had a license to hear a song in the Beast Thing's
Den--nothing was ever privileged to sing but it,--but she knew from
the way her mouth was working that Shiloh was singing.

Oh, the instinct of happiness in the human heart! To sing through
noises and aches and tired feet and stunned, blocky heads. To sing
with no hope before her and the theft of her very childhood--ay, her
life--going on by the Beast Thing and his men.

God intended us to be happy, else He had never put so strong an
instinct there.

Twelve o'clock. The Steam Beast gave a triumphant scream heard above
the roar of shuttle and steel. It was a loud, defiant, victorious
roar which drowned all others.

Then it purred and paused for breath--purred softer and softer
and--slept at last.

It was noon.

The silence now was almost as painful to Shiloh as the noise had
been. The sudden stopping of shuttle and wheel and belt and beam did
not stop the noise in her head. It throbbed and buzzed there in an
echoing ache, as if all the previous sounds had been fire-waves and
these the scorched furrows of its touch. Wherever she turned, the
echo of the morning's misery sounded in her ears.

And now they had forty minutes for noon recess.

They sat in a circle, these five children--and ate their lunch of cold
soda biscuits and fat bacon.

Not a word did they say--not a laugh nor a sound to show they were
children,--not even a sigh to show they were human.

Silently, like wooden things they choked it down and then--O men and
women who love your own little ones--look!

Huddled together on the great, greasy, dirty floor of this mill, in all
the attitudes of tired-out, exhausted childhood, they slept. Shiloh
slept bolt upright, her little head against the spinning-frame, where
all the morning she had chased the bobbins up and down the long aisle.
Appomattox and Atlanta were grouped against her. Bull Run slept at her
feet and Seven Days lay, half way over on his bobbin cart, so tired that
he wen