Little by little he worked these down until but one remained, owned by Germans, where the boy experienced great difficulty in securing any sort of attention.  The night superintendent, however, was ready to help, and Hamilton went to him constantly in the endeavor to have the schedule for that factory filled.  This was the easier, as the night superintendent in question had recently been promoted to that position from head bookkeeper.

One night, waiting for the superintendent to work out these figures, he sauntered through the works.  A phrase from Edwin Markham’s “The Hoe-Man in the Making” kept ringing through his head.  It ran as follows—­“It is in the glass-factory perhaps, that the child is pushed most hopelessly under the blind hammer of greed,” and the boy wondered whether this especial works was one of those which the poet-author had visited.  Owing to the number of times Hamilton had been forced to go to this factory, two or three of the men had come to know him by sight, and they nodded now as he passed through.  Noticing a boy that looked even younger than himself,—­for unconsciously his eye was seeking that of which he was thinking,—­he turned to one of the men who had nodded to him, and said casually, and with an air of surprise: 

“Why, that chap there doesn’t look any older than me!”

“I don’t suppose he is so very old,” the man replied, “sixteen, maybe.”

“Seems a shame to have to start in so young,” Hamilton went on, with an assumed air of carelessness, “and I suppose he’s been here some years.”

“Probably about four or five,” was the reply.

“You know,” continued Hamilton, in a conversational tone, “I should think it would be hard for a boy to start in working like that, and at night especially.”

The man paused in his work an instant, and looked at the lad, passing his hand over his forehead as he did so.

“I was just ten years old when I began,” he said.  “I’m only thirty now.  I look fifty, don’t I?”

“You certainly look over thirty,” Hamilton admitted.

“Oh, I look fifty all right, I know that, and I’m as nearly played out as a man of fifty.  And it’s all due to work when I was a youngster.  Every year that a boy is put to hard physical work before he is sixteen is equal to five years taken off his life.”

“I wonder that any employer does it, and that any State permits it,” said Hamilton.

“There’s not as much of it in Connecticut as in other States, although the figures show that it is growing here,” was the reply.  “But you talk as though you had been having a session with ‘the crusader,’” the workman continued.

“Who’s the crusader?” asked Hamilton.

“Haven’t you seen him, then?  With your ideas, you ought to get along well together.  And,” he added, more seriously, “‘the crusader’ will be heard of yet.”

“Why?”