Seven weeks as a factory-hand is very little. Like all phases of my experiment, it is but the lightest touch upon the surface of the life which I seek to understand. Strong and infinitely appealing are the basal elements of existence, and yet mysterious, evasive, receding like a spectre from your craving grasp. And in the secret of its veiled presence speaks a Voice: “Only through living is it given unto men to know; none but the heaven-sent may know otherwise. Not by experiment, but only through the poignancy of real agony and joy is my secret learned.” As a witness of certain external conditions and as a sharer in them, I may tell nothing but the truth, and yet the whole truth reaches far beyond the compass of my vision--the joys and creature comforts of men whose birth and breeding and life-long training fit them smoothly to circumstances which seem to me all friction; the blind human agony of these men, as necessity bears hard upon them, and, helpless, they watch the sufferings of their wives and children, and have no hope nor any escape but death; the unconscious delight in living intensely in the present with easy adjustment to homely surroundings, and no anxious thought for the future and no morbid introspection; the sharply conscious endurance of grim realities, which baffle the untrained reason and paralyze the will, and make of a strong man a terrified child in the grip of the superstitious horrors of disease, and loss of work, and the “bad luck” which plays so large a part in that sordid thing which he calls life. For seven weeks I have worked daily in the company of two thousand hands, and have lived with half a score of them in a tenement-house near the factory, and yet I am leaving them with but the slenderest knowledge of their lives. It was one bitter cold morning a little past the middle of December that I was taken on. I had had a good supper on the night before and a sound night’s sleep; and the pleasure of being set to work once more, of being caught up again into the meaningful movement of men, was tempered only by a lack of breakfast and a long walk through the cold gray dawn. Crist was my boss. Crist is foreman of the gangs of men who load the box-cars which flank the long platforms beside the warehouses of the factory. Wide sloping eaves project from the buildings’ sides to a point nearly over the edge of the platforms, and under these are stored the new mowers and reapers and harvesters, gay in gorgeous paint, and reduced to the point of easiest handling, their subordinate parts near by in compact crates and boxes, all ready for immediate shipment.