fields, Doctor. Ledgers and copperas are not good food for a
chicken's soul, or body either."

"Let it alone!" he growled. "You take it for a type of yourself, eh?
It has another work to do than to grow fat and sleep about the
barnyard."

She opened the cage.

"I think I will take it."

"No," he said, quietly. "It has a master here. Not P. Teagarden. Why,
Margret," pushing his stubby finger between the tin bars "do you think
the God you believe in would have sent it here without a work to do?"

She looked up; there was a curious tremour in his flabby face, a shadow
in his rough voice.

"If it dies here, its life won't have been lost. Nothing is lost. Let
it alone."

"Not lost?" she said, slowly, refastening the cage. "Only I think"----

"What, child?"

She glanced furtively at him.

"It's a hard, scraping world where such a thing as that has work to do!"

He vouchsafed no answer. She waited to see his lip curl bitterly, and
then, amused, went down the stairs. She had paid him for his sneer.

The steps were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great
staircase used by the hands: that was on the other side of the factory.
It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the suburbs of trading
towns. This one went round the four sides of a square, with the yard
for the vats in the middle. The ladders and passages she passed down
were on the inside, narrow and dimly lighted: she had to grope her way
sometimes. The floors shook constantly with the incessant thud of the
great looms that filled each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder. It
deafened her, made her dizzy, as she went down slowly. It was no short
walk to reach the lower hall, but she was down at last. Doors opened
from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw vast,
dingy recesses of boxes piled up to the dark ceilings. There was a
crowd of porters and draymen cracking their whips, and lounging on the
trucks by the door, waiting for loads, talking politics, and smoking.
The smell of tobacco, copperas, and burning logwood was heavy to
clamminess here. She stopped, uncertain. One of the porters, a short,
sickly man, who stood aloof from the rest, pushed open a door for her
with his staff. Margret had a quick memory for faces; she thought she
had seen this one before as she passed,--a dark face, sullen,
heavy-lipped, the hair cut convict-fashion, close to the head. She
thought too, one of the men muttered "jail-bir