She once told me that it required a new shuttle, and I offered to pay for one; but she said, "I cannot part with it; it will last my time, for I want a new shuttle too!" Six months after she was found dead in her bed by her partners when they came to resume work. Her words had come true! The old machine stood silent under the little window; its old shuttle no longer whirred and rattled with uncertain movements. It was motionless and cold. On a little bed the poor old brave woman lay cold and motionless too! for the shuttle of her life had stopped, never to move again. The heroic partnership of the old women was broken, never in this world to be resumed, and so two old hearts sorrowed and two troubled minds wondered how they would be able to live without her. I knew her well; it was my privilege to give her some happiness and some change from grime and gloom, to take her away sometimes from the wayward shuttle and rattling machine. I knew that she would have selected such a death could she have chosen, for she dreaded the parish. I think, too, that she would have wished for her old machine to be buried with her, and for its silent shuttle to be beside her in her coffin. To her it was a companion, and for it her husband died. Twenty-one years the machine and herself had lived with each other and for each other. Sharing with each other's toil, if not each other's hopes and fears! Working! working! unceasingly through life--in death and rest they were not divided. It was a blessed thing that her machine partner required no food, or life would have been even more serious than it was. But it had its whims and its moods, sometimes it resented everlasting work at three-half-pence per hour for the pair of them, and it "jibbed." But a little oil and a soothing word, and, it must be feared, sometimes with a threat, and the old thing went again. Surely it will be sacrilege for any one else to sit upon that old chair and try to renew the life and motion of the old machine!