It was still dark when we reached the factory gates, for the better part of an hour remained before the sun would be well up, and it was almost half an hour before the beginning of the day’s work. We were not the first to be on hand. Already there were groups of men who stood before the fast-closed gate, or stamped slowly up and down on the sleepers of the railway which enters the factory yard, or gathered for shelter behind the walls of neighboring buildings. The number of these men was growing fast. I thought at first that many of them were employees waiting for the morning opening of the factory. But when the heavy gate moved down its groove in answer to the keeper’s push, disclosing the open area of the factory yard and the long platforms flanking the warehouses, this company of waiting men, grown now to eighty or a hundred strong, stood against the high board fence and along the edges of a great stream of workingmen, which began to pour with increasing volume through the narrow way. A bell sounded from the factory tower, and you could hear the first slow movements of the piston-rods, and the answering stir among the fly-wheels as they warmed to swifter motion, and the straps and pulleys tuning up to the canticle of the working-day. [Illustration: WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES.] The sudden on-rush of factory-hands was almost a miracle. Men seemed to rise as by magic from the soil. They streamed from neighboring tenements, and along the wooden sidewalks, and from out the horse-cars which came down the streets loaded to the couplers. They had grown to the number of an army, and in rough, uneven, changing ranks they walked briskly, five, six, nine men abreast, while the bell tapped off nervously the swift approach of seven o’clock. Two men seated in a buggy drove their horse slowly into the thick of the crowd, which deflected at the gate to let them pass, and then closed in behind with increased momentum. The superintendent of the factory stepped down from the buggy and climbed the staircase to his office.