recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men
and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell
as of rubbed amber--the characteristic smell of composite when subjected
to friction....

And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making
horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social
unease do.

They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong,
sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts
... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements.

Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding,
squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with
women.

They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness
and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they
were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick
were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it,
laughing grimly with the "boys."

Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a
greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all
gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men
seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to
themselves.

In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the
workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure
to be hit as you passed through.

The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards
around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of
some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company
could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of
America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on
week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the
pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each
man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But
many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness,
dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they
dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was
not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy
Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young
girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked,