In the brief space of an hour she beheld the dirty bales flung off the
freight cars on the sidings transformed into delicate fabrics wound from
the looms; cotton that only last summer, perhaps, while she sat
typewriting at her window, had been growing in the fields of the South.
She had seen it torn by the bale-breakers, blown into the openers,
loosened, cleansed, and dried; taken up by the lappers, pressed into
batting, and passed on to the carding machines, to emerge like a wisp of
white smoke in a sliver and coil automatically in a can. Once more it was
flattened into a lap, given to a comber that felt out its fibres,
removing with superhuman precision those for the finer fabric too short,
thrusting it forth again in another filmy sliver ready for the drawing
frames. Six of these gossamer ropes were taken up, and again six. Then
came the Blubbers and the roving frames, twisting and winding, the while
maintaining the most delicate of tensions lest the rope break, running
the strands together into a thread constantly growing stronger and finer,
until it was ready for spinning.

Caldwell stood close to her, shouting his explanations in her ear, while
she strained to follow them. But she was bewildered and entranced by the
marvellous swiftness, accuracy and ease with which each of the complex
machines, fed by human hands, performed its function. These human hands
were swift, too, as when they thrust the bobbins of roving on the
ring-spinning frames to be twisted into yarn. She saw a woman, in the
space of an instant, mend a broken thread. Women and boys were here,
doffer boys to lift off the full bobbins of yarn with one hand and set on
the empty bobbins with the other: while skilled workmen, alert for the
first sign of trouble, followed up and down in its travels the long frame
of the mule-spinner. After the spinning, the heavy spools of yarn were
carried to a beam-warper, standing alone like a huge spider's web, where
hundreds of threads were stretched symmetrically and wound evenly, side
by side, on a large cylinder, forming the warp of the fabric to be woven
on the loom. First, however, this warp must be stiffened or "slashed" in
starch and tallow, dried over heated drums, and finally wound around one
great beam from which the multitude of threads are taken up, one by one,
and slipped through the eyes of the loom harnesses by women who sit all
day under the north windows overlooking the canal--the "drawers-in" of
wh