Although these mills are within three hundred feet of each other, the villagers do not associate.  The workings of Granton are unknown to Excelsior and vice versa.

The speeding-room in Granton is second only in noise to the weave-room.  Conversation must be entrancing and vital to be pursued here!  The speeder has under her care as many machines as her skill can control.

My teacher, Bessie, ran four sides, seventy-six speeders on a side, her work being regulated by a crank that marked the vibrations.  To the lay mind the terms of the speeding-room can mean nothing.  This girl made from $1.30 to $1.50 a day.  She controlled in all 704 speeders; these she had to replenish and keep running, and to clean all the machinery gear with her own hands; to oil the steel, even to bend and clean under the lower shelf and come into contact with the most dangerous parts of the mechanism.  The girl at the speeder next to me had just had her hand mashed to a jelly.  The speeder watches her ropers run out; these stand at the top and back of the line.  The ropers are refilled and their ends attached to the flying speeders by a quick motion.  The yarn from the ropers is wound off on to the speeders.  When the speeders are full of yarn they are detached from the nest of steel in which they whirl and are thrown into a hand-car which is pushed about the room by the girls themselves.  Speeding is excessively dirty work and greasy; the oiling and cleaning is only fit for a man to do.

The girl who teaches me has been at her work for ten years; she entered the factory at eight.  She was tall, raw-boned, an expert, deft and capable, and, as far as I could judge in our acquaintance, thoroughly respectable.

There are long waits in this department of the cotton-spinning life.  On tall green stools we sit at the end of our sides during the time it takes for one well-filled roper to spin itself out; we talk, or rather contrive to make ourselves heard.  She has a sweet, gentle face; she is courtesy and kindness itself.

“What do you think about all day?”

“Why, I couldn’t even begin to tell all my thoughts.”

“Tell me some.”

“Why, I think about books, I reckon.  Do you-all like readin’?”

“Yes.”

“Ain’t nuthin’ I like so good when I ain’t tyrd.”

“Are you often tired?” And this question surprises her.  She looks up at me and smiles.  “Why, I’m always tyrd!  I read novels for the most part; like to read love stories and about fo’ran travel.”

(For one short moment please consider:  This hemmed-in life, this limited existence, encompassed on all sides by the warfare and battle and din of maddening sounds, vibrations around her during twelve hours of the day, vibrations which, mean that her food is being gained by each pulse of the engine and its ratio marked off by the disk at her side.  Before her the scene is unchanged day after day, month after month, year