a chilly
shudder. He smiled, thinking how superstitious people would say that
some one trod on his grave just then, or that Death looked at him, and
went on. Afterwards he thought of it. Going through the office, the fat
old book-keeper, Huff, stopped him with a story he had been keeping for
him all day. He liked to tell a story to Holmes; he could see into a
joke; it did a man good to hear a fellow laugh like that. Holmes did
laugh, for the story was a good one, and stood a moment, then went in,
leaving the old fellow chuckling over his desk. Huff did not know how,
lately, after every laugh, this man felt a vague scorn of himself, as if
jokes and laughter belonged to a self that ought to have been dead long
ago. Perhaps, if the fat old book-keeper had known it, he would have
said that the man was better than he knew. But then,--poor Huff! He
passed slowly through the long alleys between the great looms. Overhead
the ceiling looked like a heavy maze of iron cylinders and black
swinging bars and wheels, all in swift, ponderous motion. It was enough
to make a brain dizzy with the clanging thunder of the engines, the
whizzing spindles of red and yellow, and the hot daylight glaring over
all. The looms were watched by women, most of them bold, tawdry girls
of fifteen or sixteen, or lean-jawed women from the hills, wives of the
coal-diggers. There was a breathless odor of copperas. As he went from
one room to another up through the ascending stories, he had a vague
sensation of being followed. Some shadow lurked at times behind the
engines, or stole after him in the dark entries. Were there ghosts,
then, in mills in broad daylight? None but the ghosts of Want and Hunger
and Crime, he might have known, that do not wait for night to walk our
streets: the ghosts that poor old Knowles hoped to lay forever.

Holmes had a room fitted up in the mill, where he slept. He went up
to it slowly, holding the paper tightly in one hand, glancing at the
operatives, the work, through his furtive half-shut eye. Nothing escaped
him. Passing the windows, he did not once look out at the prophetic
dream of beauty he had left without. In the mill he was of the mill.
Yet he went slowly, as if he shrank from the task waiting for him.
Why should he? It was a simple matter of business, this transfer of
Knowles's share in the mill to himself; to-day he was to decide whether
he would conclude the bargain. If any dark history of wrong lay
underneath, if