So she followed the old road, along which her sisters had tramped from immemorial time, and would still tramp through the generations to come, when her journey was ended and the wonderful country of man’s love explored—­its oases visited, its antres endured.

Now Sabina played priestess to the Spinning Machine—­a monster reared above her, stupendous and insatiable.

Along the summit of the Spinning Frame, just within reach of tall Sabina’s uplifted hand, there perched a row of reels from which the finished material descended through series of rollers.  The retaining roller aloft gave it to the steel delivery roller which drew the thin, sad-looking stuff with increased speed downward.  And here at its moment of most shivering tenuity, when the perfected and purified material seemed reduced to an extremity of weakness, came the magic change.  Unseen in the whirring complexity of the spinner, it received the momentous gift that translates fibre to yarn.  In a moment it changed from stuff a baby’s finger could break to thread capable of supporting fifteen pounds of pressure.  For now came the twist—­that word of mighty significance—­and the tiny thread of new-born yarn descended to the spindle, vanished in the whirl of the flier and reappeared, an accomplished miracle, winding on the bobbin beneath.

Upon the spindle revolved the flier—­a fork of steel with guide eye at one leg of the fork—­and through the guide eye came the twisted yarn to wind on the bobbin below.  There, as the bobbin frame rose and fell, the thread was perfectly delivered to the reel and coiled off layer by layer upon it.

Mrs. Northover stared to see the nature of a Spinner’s duties and the ease with which she controlled the great, pulsing, roaring frame of a hundred spindles.  Sabina’s eyes were everywhere; her hands were never still; her feet seemed to dance a measure to the thunder of the Frame.  Now she marked a roving reel aloft that was running out, and in a moment she had broken the sliver, swept away the empty reel and hung up a full one.  Then she drew the new sliver down to the point of the break and, in a moment, the two merged and the thread ran on.  Now her fingers touched the spindles, as a musician touches the keys, and at a moment’s pressure the machine obeyed and the yarn flew on its way obedient.  Now she cleared a snarl, or catch, where a spindle appeared to have run amuck or created hopeless confusion; now she readjusted the weights that kept a drag on the humming bobbins.  Her twinkling hands touched and calmed and fed the monster.  She knew its whims, corrected its errors, brought to her insensate machine the complement of brain that made it trustworthy.  And when the bobbins were all full, she hastened along the Frame, turned off the driving power and silenced the huge activity in a moment.  Then, like lightning, she cut her hundred threads and lifted the bobbins from their spindles until she had a pile upon her shoulder.  In a marvellously short time she had doffed the bobbins and set up a hundred empty ones.  Then the cut threads were readjusted, the power turned on and all was motion again.