anked by heavy walls. Had her experience included
Europe, her imagination might have seized the medieval parallel,--the
arched bridges flung at intervals across the water, lacking only
chains to raise them in case of siege. The place was always ominously
suggestive of impending strife. Janet's soul was a sensitive instrument,
but she suffered from an inability to find parallels, and thus to
translate her impressions intellectually. Her feeling about the mills
was that they were at once fortress and prison, and she a slave driven
thither day after day by an all-compelling power; as much a slave as
those who trooped in through the gates in the winter dawn, and wore
down, four times a day, the oak treads of the circular tower stairs.

The sound of the looms was like heavy rain hissing on the waters of the
canal.

The administrative offices of a giant mill such as the Chippering in
Hampton are labyrinthine. Janet did not enter by the great gates her
father kept, but walked through an open courtyard into a vestibule
where, day and night, a watchman stood; she climbed iron-shod stairs,
passed the doorway leading to the paymaster's suite, to catch a
glimpse, behind the grill, of numerous young men settling down at those
mysterious and complicated machines that kept so unerring a record, in
dollars and cents, of the human labour of the operatives. There were
other suites for the superintendents, for the purchasing agent; and at
the end of the corridor, on the south side of the mill, she entered the
outer of the two rooms reserved for Mr. Claude Ditmar, the Agent and
general-in-chief himself of this vast establishment. In this outer
office, behind the rail that ran the length of it, Janet worked; from
the window where her typewriter stood was a sheer drop of eighty feet or
so to the river, which ran here swiftly through a wide canon whose sides
were formed by miles and miles of mills, built on buttressed stone walls
to retain the banks. The prison-like buildings on the farther shore were
also of colossal size, casting their shadows far out into the waters;
while in the distance, up and down the stream, could be seen the
delicate web of the Stanley and Warren Street bridges, with trolley cars
like toys gliding over them, with insect pedestrians creeping along the
footpaths.

Mr. Ditmar's immediate staff consisted of Mr. Price, an elderly bachelor
of tried efficiency whose peculiar genius lay in computation, of a young
Mr. Cald