s with their stray livelihoods, or a
wandering vagabond life, takes them; refuges, police-stations, prisons
and the house of correction take them. In later years, labour also, on a
great scale, has taken them into its embrace--the factory doors stand
wide open.

People who now and then have an attack of conscientious scruples about
existences to which they may possibly stand in original relationship,
can draw a sigh of relief. The responsibility is at any rate diminished,
as the chances now are that they will be drawn into Labour's educating
wheel; and then, too, the matter is in certain respects carried over
into moral territory.

There they sat, the more ripely-developed youth of the town, in rows
up in the rooms of the Veyergang firm's great factory, and minded the
whirring shuttles, balls and rollers--Swedish Lena, and Stina, and
Kristofa, and Kalla, and Josefa and Gunda, and all the rest of them. Had
any one asked them about their parents, they would now and then have
been hard put to it for an answer.

The conversation went on very busily at the top of the room; it was even
continued with nods and glances whenever one or other of the controlling
authorities turned his steps in that direction. They had to gesticulate,
nod, talk in a loud voice, but they got on best with their faces close
up to one another in all this whizzing, where the band-wheels each
whirred away for their little sub-division of power, the boards of the
floor quivered and shook with the movement of the engines, and the
waterfall outside in the sun, with a thundering and deafening roar,
buried the great water-wheel beneath its creamy, powerful splendour.

They were for the most part quite young vagabond girls of from barely
sixteen to twenty, who were making the noise up there: new-comers, more
or less, without practice, who were still striving to acquire the knack.
And that was Silla Holman, she with the dark hair, slender and freckled,
with heelless slippers and a large spot of paraffine on the front of her
dress, who coughed and questioned, and questioned and coughed, while her
eyes looked like two little round, black fire-balls, and her weak, flat
chest went up and down with the mere exertion of making herself heard.
She sat there among the youngest; her fingers worked among the spools,
and now and then she looked up like a bird.

They had got over the angry dispute about Josefa's new braided jacket.
She need not try to persuade any one