ight, her lips were drawn.

"Oh, it can't hurt you, Shiloh," said her sister pulling her along.
"You'll be all right when you get inside."

There was a snarling clatter and crescendo tremble, ending in an
all-drowning roar, as the big door was pushed open for a moment, and
Shiloh, quaking, but brave, was pulled in, giving the tiny spark of
her little life to add to the Big Thing's fire.

Within, she was reassured; for there was her familiar spinning frame,
with its bobbins ready to be set to spinning and whirling; and the
room was full of people, many as small as she.

The companionship, even of fear, is helpful.

Besides, the roar and clatter drowned everything else.

Shiloh was too small to see, to know; but had she looked to the right
as she entered, she had seen a sight which would have caused a stone
man to flush with pity. It was Byrd Boyle, one of the mill hands who
ran a slubbing machine, and he held in his arms (because they were
too young to walk so far) twins, a boy and a girl. And they looked
like half made up dolls left out on the grass, weather-beaten by
summer rains. They were too small to know where their places were in
the room, and as their father sat them down, in their proper places,
it took the two together to run one side of a spinner, and the tiny
little workers could scarcely reach to their whirling bobbins.

To the credit of Richard Travis, this working of children under
twelve years of age in the mills was done over his protest. Not so
with Kingsley and his wife, who were experienced mill people from New
England and knew the harm of it--morally, physically. Travis had even
made strict regulations on the subject, only to be overruled by the
combined disapproval of Kingsley and the directors and, strange to
say, of the parents of the children themselves. His determination
that only children of twelve years and over should work in the mill
came to naught, more from the opposition of the parents themselves
than that of Kingsley. These, to earn a little more for the family,
did not hesitate to bring a child of eight to the mill and swear it
was twelve. This and the ruling of the directors,--and worse than
all, the lack of any state law on the subject,--had brought about the
pitiful condition which prevailed then as now in Southern cotton
mills.

There was no talking inside the mill. Only the Big Thing was
permitted to talk. No singing--for songs come from the happy heart of
labor, unshackl