We stitched our way industriously over the 7,000 dozen.  Except for the moments when some girl called a message or shouted a conversation, there was nothing to occupy the mind but the vibrating, pulsing, pounding of the machinery.  The body was shaken with it; the ears strained.

The little girl opposite me was a new hand.  Her rosy cheeks and straight shoulders announced this fact.  She had been five months in the mill; the other girls around her had been there two years, five years, nine years.  There were 150 of us at the long, narrow tables which filled the room.  By the windows the light and air were fairly good.  At the centre tables the atmosphere was stagnant, the shadows came too soon.  The wood’s edge ran within a few yards of the factory windows.  Between it and us lay the stream, the water force, the power that had called men to Perry.  There, as everywhere in America, for an individual as for a place, the attraction was industrial possibilities.  As Niagara has become more an industrial than a picturesque landscape, so Perry, in spite of its serene and beautiful surroundings, is a shrine to mechanical force in whose temple, the tall-chimneyed mill, a human sacrifice is made to the worshipers of gain.

My vis-a-vis was talkative.  “Say,” she said to her neighbour, “Jim Weston is the worst flirt I ever seen.”

“Who’s Jim Weston?” the other responded, diving into the box by her side for a handful of gray woolen shirts.

“Why, he’s the one who made my teeth—­he made teeth for all of us up home,” and her smile reveals the handiwork of Weston.

“If I had false teeth,” is the comment made upon this, “I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

“I thought some,” continues the implacable new girl, unruffled, “of having a gold filling put in one of my front teeth.  I think gold fillings are so pretty,” she concludes, looking toward me for a response.

This primitive love of ornament I found manifest in the same medico-barbaric fancy for wearing eye-glasses.  The nicety of certain operations in the mill, performed not always in the brightest of lights, is a fatal strain upon the eyes.  There are no oculists in Perry, but a Buffalo member of the profession makes a monthly visit to treat a new harvest of patients.  Their daily effort toward the monthly finishing of 40,000 garments permanently diminishes their powers of vision.  Every thirty days a new set of girls appears with glasses.  They wear them as they would an ornament of some kind, a necklace, bracelet or a hoop through the nose.

When the six o’clock whistle blew on the first night I had finished only two dozen shirts.  “You’ve got a good job,” my teacher said, as we came out together in the cool evening air.  “You seem to be taking to it.”  They size a girl up the minute she comes in.  If she has quick motions she’ll get on all right.  “I guess you’ll make a good finisher.”