In the shops the odours are more easily endured than is the noise.  All conversation is shrieked out, and all the vision that one has as one lifts one’s eyes from time to time is a sky seen through dirty window-panes, distant chimney-pots, and the roof-lines of like houses of toil.

* * * * *

I gathered this from our interrupted talk that flowed unceasingly despite the noise of our hammers and the noise of the general room.

They worked at a trade uncongenial.  Not one had a good word to say for shop-labour there, despite its advantages, in this progressive land of generous pay.  Each woman in a narrow, touching degree was a dreamer.  Housework! too servile; but then, compared to shopwork it was leisure.

By four the gas was lit here and there where burners were available.  Over our heads was no arrangement for lighting.  We bent lower in semi-obscurity.  In the blending of twilight and gaslight the room became mysterious, a shadowy corridor.  Figures grew indistinct, softened and blurred.  The exhausted air surrounded the gas jets in misty circles.

Unaltered alone was the ceaseless thud, the chopping, pounding of the machinery, the long soughing of the power-engine.

Here and there a woman stops to rest a second, her head sunk in her hand; or she rises, stretches limbs and body.  A man wanders in from the next room, a pipe in his mouth, or a bad cigar, and pausing by one of the pale operators, whose space of rest is done, he flings down in front of her a new pile of piece-work from the cutting machines.

We are up five flights of stairs.  There are at least two hundred girls.  Machine oil, rags, refuse, cover the floor—­such debris as only awaits a spark from a lighted match or cigar to burst into flames.  Despite laws and regulations the building is not fire-proof.  There is no fire-escape.  A cry of fire, and great Heaven! what escape for two hundred of us from this mountain height, level with roofs of the distant town!

Thus these women, shapes mysterious in gaslight and twilight, labour:  life is at stake; health, youth, vigour, supply little more than bread.  I rise; my bruised limbs, at first numb, then aching, stir for the first time after five hours of steady work.  The pile of shoes before me is feeble evidence of the last hours’ painful effort.

I get into my clothes—­skirt, jacket and hat, all impregnated now with factory and tenement odours, and stumble downstairs and out into the street.  I have earned fifty cents to-day—­but then, I am green!

When once more in the cool, fresh air, released, I draw in a long and grateful breath.

Lynn on this winter night is a snow-bound, midwinter village.  In the heavens is the moon’s ghost, a mist-shrouded, far-away disk.  But it is the Christmas moon, shining on the sleeping thousands in the town, where night alone is free.  The giant factories are silent, the machines at last quiet, the long workrooms moon-invaded.  Labour is holy, but serfdom is accursed, and toil which demands that every hour of daylight should be spent in the race for existence—­all of the daylight—­is kin to slavery!  There is no time for mental or physical upright-standing, no time for pleasure.