e, help almost collapsing with
surprise on seeing mere children from the age of six to ten working away
at the looms with a quickness and ease that makes one feel very small.

In badly lighted and worse ventilated rooms, they sit perched in long
rows on benches at various altitudes from the floor, according to the
progression and size of the carpet, the web of which is spread tight
vertically in front of them. Occasionally when the most difficult
patterns are executed, or for patterns with European innovations in the
design, a coloured drawing is hung up above the workers; but usually
there is nothing for them to go by, except that a superintendent--an
older boy--sings out the stitches in a monotonous cadence. A row of
coloured balls of the various coloured threads employed in the design
hang from the loom just within reach of the boys' hands.

[Illustration: Boys Weaving a Carpet.]

[Illustration: Cotton Cleaners.]

The process of carpet-making is extremely simple, consisting merely of a
series of twisted--not absolutely knotted--coloured worsted threads, each
passing round one of the main threads of the foundation web. The
catching-up of each consecutive vertical thread in the web, inserting the
coloured worsted, giving it the twist that makes it remain in its
position, and cutting it to the proper length, is done so quickly by the
tiny, supple fingers of the children that it is impossible to see how it
is done at all until one requests them to do it slowly for one's benefit.
After each horizontal row of twisted threads, a long horizontal thread is
interwoven, and then the lot is beaten down with a heavy iron comb with a
handle to it, not unlike a huge hair-brush cleaner. There are different
modes of twisting the threads, and this constitutes the chief
characteristic of carpets made in one province or another.

The labour involved in their manufacture is enormous, and some carpets
take several years to manufacture. The children employed are made to work
very hard at the looms--seldom less than twelve or fourteen hours a
day--and the exertion upon their memory to remember the design, which has
taken them several months to learn by heart, is great. The constant
strain on the eyes, which have to be kept fixed on each successive
vertical thread so as not to pick up the wrong one, is very injurious to
their sight. Many of the children of the factories I visited were
sore-eyed, and there was hardly a poor mite who did n