Thus she sets her dogged resistance in scowling black looks, in quick, frantic gestures and motions against the machinery that claims her impotent childhood.  The nimbus around her furze of hair remains; there are other heads than saints—­there are martyrs!  Let the child wear her crown.

Through the looms I catch sight of Upton’s, my landlord’s, little child.  She is seven; so small that they have a box for her to stand upon.  She is a pretty, frail, little thing, a spooler—­“a good spooler, tew!” Through the frames on the other side I can only see her fingers as they clutch at the flying spools; her head is not high enough, even with the box, to be visible.  Her hands are fairy hands, fine-boned, well-made, only they are so thin and dirty, and her nails—­claws; she would do well to have them cut.  A nail can be torn from the finger, is torn from the finger frequently,[9] by this flying spool.  I go over to Upton’s little girl.  Her spindles are not thinner nor her spools whiter.

[Footnote 9:  In Huntsville, Alabama, a child of eight lost her index and middle fingers of the right hand in January, 1902.  One doctor told me that he had amputated the fingers of more than a hundred babies.  A merchant told me he had frequently seen children whose hands had been cut off by the machinery.—­American Federationist.]

“How old are you?”

“Ten.”

She looks six.  It is impossible to know if what she says is true.  The children are commanded both by parents and bosses to advance their ages when asked.

“Tired?”

She nods, without stopping.  She is a “remarkable fine hand.”  She makes forty cents a day.  See the value of this labour to the manufacturer—­cheap, yet skilled; to the parent it represents $2.40 per week.

I must not think that as I work beside them I will gain their confidence!  They have no time to talk.  Indeed, conversation is not well looked upon by the bosses, and I soon see that unless I want to entail a sharp reproof for myself and them I must stick to my “side.”  And at noon I have no heart to take their leisure.  At twelve o’clock, Minnie, a little spooler, scarcely higher than her spools, lifts her hands above her head and exclaims:  "Thank God, there’s the whistle!" I watched them disperse:  some run like mad, always bareheaded, to fetch the dinner-pail for mother or father who work in the mill and who choose to spend these little legs and spare their own.  It takes ten minutes to go, ten to return, and the little labourer has ten to devote to its own food, which, half the time, he is too exhausted to eat.

I watch the children crouch on the floor by the frames; some fall asleep between the mouthfuls of food, and so lie asleep with food in their mouths until the overseer rouses them to their tasks again.  Here and there totters a little child just learning to walk; it runs and crawls the length of the mill.  Mothers who have no one with whom to leave their babies bring them to the workshop, and their lives begin, continue and end in the horrible pandemonium.