greedy machines while I was within sound of them; but away from them I forgot all external sight and sound.  I can remember in my boyhood once I was waked from my reveries.  I was walking beneath a high stone-wall, with my eyes and head bent down as usual, when I was roused by a shower of rose-buds that fell over my shoulders and folded arms.  I heard laughter, and looked up to see a childish face with sunny, golden curls tumbling over it; and a surprised voice cried out, “Gloomy Robert is looking up!” The picture of the face hung in my memory long after, with the sound of the happy voice, as though it came out of another world.  But it remained only a picture, and I never asked myself whether that sunny face ever made any home happy, nor did I ever listen for that voice again from behind the high stone-wall.

Many years of my life passed away.  There were changes in the factories.  The machines grew more like human beings, and we men could act more like machines.  There were fewer of us needed; but I still held my place, and my steadiness gave me a position.

One day, in the end of May, I was walking early in the morning towards the factories, as usual, when suddenly there fell across my path a glowing beam of sunshine that lighted up the grass before me.  I stopped to see how the green blades danced in its light, how the sunshine fell down the sloping, bank across the stream below.  Whirring insects seemed to be suddenly born in its beam.  The stream flowed more gayly, the flowers on its brim were richer in color.  A voice startled me.  It was only that of one of my fellow-workmen, as he shouted, “Look at Gloomy Robert!—­there’s a sunbeam in his way, and he stumbles over it!” It was really so.  I had stumbled over a beam of sunlight.  I had never observed the sunshine before.  Now, what life it gave, as it gleamed under the trees!  I kept on my way, but the thought of it followed me all up the weary stairs into the high room where the great machines were standing silently.  Suddenly, after my work began, through a high narrow window poured a strip of sunshine.  It fell across the colored threads which were weaving diligently their work.  This day the work was of an unusually artistic nature.  We have our own artists in the mills, artists who must work under severe limitations.  Within a certain space their fancy revels, and then its lines are suddenly cut short.  Nature scatters her flowers as she pleases over the field, does not measure her groups to see that they stand symmetrically, nor count her several daisies that they may be sure to repeat themselves in regular order.  But our artist must fit his stems to certain angles so that their lines may be continuous, constantly repeating themselves, the same group recurring, yet in a hidden monotony.