s to wash his face."

She laughed at the thought of it. But the other children, who had
dressed, sat listlessly in their seats, looking at her with
irresponsive eyes, set deep back into tired, lifeless, weazened
faces.

"I'd ruther a rabbit 'ud wash his face than mine," drawled Bull Run.

Mrs. Watts came in and jerked the chair from under him and he sat
down sprawling. Then he lazily arose and deliberately spat, between
his teeth, into the fireplace.

There was not enough of him alive to feel that he had been imposed
upon.

For breakfast they had big soda biscuits and fried bacon floating in
its own grease. There was enough of it left for the midday lunch.
This was put into a tin pail with a tight fitting top. The pail, when
opened, smelt of the death and remains of every other soda biscuit
that had ever been laid away within this tightly closed mausoleum of
tin.

They had scarcely eaten before the shrill scream of the mill-whistle
called them to their work.

Shiloh, at the sound, stuck her small fingers into her ears and
shuddered.

Then the others struck out across the yard, and Shiloh followed.

To this child of seven, who had already worked six months in the
factory, the scream of the whistle was the call of a frightful
monster, whose black smoke-stack of a snout, with its blacker breath
coming out, and the flaming eyes of the engine glaring through the
smoke, completed the picture of a wild beast watching her. Within,
the whirr and tremble of shuttle and machinery were the purr and
pulsation of its heart.

She was a nervous, sensitive child, who imagined far more than she
saw; and the very uncanniness of the dark misty morning, the silence,
broken only by the tremble and roar of the mill, the gaunt shadows of
the overtopping mountain, filled her with childish fears.

Nature can do no more than she is permitted; and the terrible strain
of twelve hours' work, every day except Sunday, for the past six
months, where every faculty, from hand and foot to body, eye and
brain, must be alert and alive to watch and piece the never-ceasing
breaking of the threads, had already begun to undermine the
half-formed framework of that little life.

As she approached the mill she clung to the hand of Appomattox, and
shrinking, kept her sister between herself and the Big Thing which
put the sweet morning air a-flutter around its lair. As she drew near
the door she almost cried out in affright--her little heart grew
t