olerable living. So the couple desired a child, but
desired it for years in vain. Often, at the end of the day's work, when
Gottfried sat on the bench in front of his house and smoked his pipe, he
would say: "How good it would be if we had a son." Marian would fall
silent and lower her eyes.

As time passed, he stopped saying that, because he would not put the
woman to shame. But his expression betrayed his desire all the more
clearly.

II

A day came on which his trade seemed to come to a halt. The weavers in
all the land complained that they could not keep their old pace. It was
as though a creeping paralysis had come upon them. The market prices
suddenly dropped, and the character of the goods was changed.

This took place toward the end of the eighteen hundred and fifties, when
the new power looms were being introduced from America. No toil profited
anything. The cheap product which the machines could furnish destroyed
the sale of the hand-made weaves.

At first Gottfried Nothafft refused to be cast down. Thus the wheel of a
machine will run on for a space after the power has been cut off. But
gradually his courage failed. His hair turned grey in a single winter,
and at the age of forty-five he was a broken man.

And just as poverty appeared threatening at their door, and the soul of
Marian began to be stained by hatred, the longing of the couple was
fulfilled, and the wife became pregnant in the tenth year of their
marriage.

The hatred which she nourished was directed against the power loom. In
her dreams she saw the machine as a monster with thighs of steel, which
screamed out its malignity and devoured the hearts of men. She was
embittered by the injustice of a process which gave to impudence and
sloth the product that had once come thoughtfully and naturally from the
careful hands of men.

One journeyman after another had to be discharged, and one hand-loom
after another to be stored in the attic. On many days Marian would slip
up the stairs and crouch for hours beside the looms, which had once been
set in motion by a determinable and beneficent exertion and were like
corpses now.

Gottfried wandered across country, peddling the stock of goods he had on
hand. Once on his return he brought with him a piece of machine-made
cloth which a merchant of Noerdlingen had given him. "Look, Marian, see
what sort of stuff it is," he said, and handed it to her. But Marian
drew