I stepped on a stone and felt the place on my heel where the limestone and sweat had worked together, to make a burn. I'd be hurrying in at 5.00 o'clock that day, and they'd be going home. It was now 7.20. That would be nine and a half hours hence. I had to eat twice, and buy a pair of gloves, and sew up my shirt, and get sleep before then. I lived twenty minutes from the mill. If I walk home, as fast as I can drive my legs and bolt breakfast, seven hours is all I can work in before 3.30. I'll have to get up then to get time for dinner, fixing up my shirt, and the walk to the mill. I wonder how long this night-shift of gray-faced men, with different-sized dinner-buckets, will be moving out toward the green gate, and the day-shift coming in at the green gate--how many years? The car up from the nail mill stopped just before it dove under the railroad bridge. "I'm in luck." I suddenly had a vision of how the New York subway looked: its crush, its noise, its overdressed Jews, its speed, its subway smell. I looked around inside the clattering trolley-car. Nobody was talking. The car was filled for the most part with Slavs, a few Italians, and some negroes from the nail mill. Everyone, except two old men of unknown age, was under thirty-five. They held their buckets on their laps, or put them on the floor between their legs. Six or eight were asleep. The rest sat quiet, with legs and neck loose, with their eyes open, steady, dull, fixed upon nothing at all. IV EVERYDAY LIFE I came into the mill five minutes late one morning, and went to the green check-house at the gate, to pick 1611, the numerical me, from the hook. A stumpy man in a chair looked up and said: "What number?" I gave it. "An easy way to lose forty-three cents," I thought, feeling a little sore at the stumpy man, and going out through the door slowly. I increased my step along the road to the open-hearth, and reached my locker just as the Pole who shared it was leaving. "Goddam gloves!" he was saying. "Pay thirty-five cents--three days--goddam it--all gone--too much. What you think?" "I think the leather ones at fifty cents last better," I said. He made a guttural noise, signifying disgust, and left. I opened the locker, and disentangled my working-clothes, still damp from the last shift, from the Pole's. I removed all my "good" clothes, and stood for a minute naked and comfortable. The thermometer had registered 95° when I got up, at 4.00. For the past few days I had been demoted to the pit; there had been no jobs open on the floor. As I took up my gloves and smoked glasses, I wondered how I could get back to furnace work. Pete was moving with his lurching short steps past Six. "How about helping to-day on the floor?" I said. He snapped back quickly in his blurred voice, "You work th' pit, tell y'--goddam quick, want y' on the floor." I looked back at him, swore to myself, and went slowly down the pit stairs.