“But don’t you smell it from here?”

“Not so bad; this here” (pointing to her black fluid) “smells stronger; it drownds it.

“I make my wages clear,” she announced to me a few minutes later.

“How do you mean?”

“Why, at noon I wait in a restaurant; they give me my dinner afterward.  I go back there and wait on the table at supper, too.  My vittles don’t cost me anything!”

So that is where your golden noon hour is spent, standing, running, waiting, serving in the ill-smelling restaurant I shall name later; and not your dinner hour alone, but the long day’s fag end!

“I ain’t from these parts,” she continued, confidentially, “I’m down East.  I used to run a machine, but it hurts my side.”

My job went well for an amateur.  I finished one case of shoes (thirty-six pairs) in little more than an hour.  By ten o’clock the room grew stifling hot.  I was obliged to discard my dress skirt and necktie, loosen collar, roll up my sleeves.  My warmer blooded companions did the like.  It was singular to watch the clock mark out the morning hours, and at ten, already early, very early in the forenoon, feel tired because one had been three hours at work.

A man came along with nuts and apples in a basket to sell.  I bought an apple for five cents.  It was regarded by my teacher, Maggie, as a prodigal expenditure!  I shared it with her, and she in turn shared her half with her neighbours, advising me wisely.

“Say, you’d better earn an apple before you buy one!”

My companion on the other side was a pretty country girl.  She regarded her work with good-humoured indifference; indeed, her labour was of very indifferent quality.  I don’t believe she was ever intended to make shoes.  In a cheerful “undertone she sang topical songs the morning long.  It drove Maggie McGowan “mad,” so she said.

“Say, why don’t some of youse sing?” said the little creature, looking down our busy line.  “I never hear no singing in the shops.”

Maggie said, “Sing!  Well, I don’t come here to sing.”

The other laughed sweetly.

“Well, I jest have to sing.”

“You seem happy; are you?” She looked at me out of her pretty blue eyes.

“You bet!  That’s the way to be!” Then after a little, in an aside to me alone, she whispered: 

“Not always.  Sometimes I cry all to myself.

“See the sun?” she exclaimed, lifting her head. (It shone golden through the window’s dirty, cloudy pane.) “He’s peekin’ at me!  He’ll find you soon.  Looks like he was glad to see us sitting here!”

Sun, friend, light, air, seek them—­seek them!  Pour what tide of pure gold you may in through the sullied pane; touch, caress the bowed heads at the clicking machines!  Shine on the dusty, untidy hair! on the bowed shoulders! on the flying hands!

At noon I made a reluctant concession to wisdom and habit.  Unwilling to thwart my purposes and collapse from sheer fatigue, at the dinner hour I went to a restaurant and ordered a meal in keeping with my appetite.  I had never been so hungry.  I almost wept with joy when the chicken and cranberry and potato appeared.  Never was sauce more poignant than that which seasoned the only real repast I had in Lynn.