Mrs. Schulz had offered me board and lodging at four dollars a week, or at four dollars and a quarter if I wished a room to myself. It was the last bargain with which I closed when I was shown the only vacant room. It opened from the passage near the head of the landing and was perhaps seven feet by six. A single bed filled most of its area, and the rest was crowded with a chair and a small stand which supported an oil-lamp under a mirror on the wall. Some nails driven into the door and along the wall beside it, served the purpose of a closet. Light and air entered by a window which opened only a foot or two from a side-wall of the next building. Cheerless as the room was and far from clean, it yet had about it all the essentials of privacy, and at a little past eight o’clock I went to bed with almost the sense of luxury after a fortnight’s experience of station-houses and cheap lodgings. At six in the morning we were called by Mrs. Schulz, who had already been up for an hour or more preparing our breakfast, with the help of a hired girl. The men turned out sleepy and half-dressed into the kitchen to wash themselves, and then we sat down to a breakfast of “mush,” meat and potatoes, coffee and bread. The factory-bell was ringing by the time that we had finished, and there was a rush to get within the gate before the last taps marked the advent of seven o’clock. The routine of factory work does not lend itself to varied narrative, and yet Barry’s work and mine was far from the monotony of much of the labor which we saw about us. There was a growing supply of tongues in the paint-shop, sufficient to keep us busy for several days, and while the work of loading and carting and stacking them was not hard in itself, ten hours of it daily was enough to send a man very hungry to his meals and thoroughly tired to his bed. I was soon transferred from Crist’s department to one of the packing-rooms, where, through the remaining weeks of my service, I worked as a general utility man under the orders of a short, muscular foreman of singularly mild manner, who appeared to have scruples against swearing, but who was none the less vigilant and effective in his management. Most of the work of his department, as in all the departments of the factory, came under the piece-work system, and I was simply one of the two or three common laborers who, under his commands, attended to the odds and ends of jobs. In one corner a man was packing boxes with the subordinate parts of mowers--a very interesting process, for the boxes were of such a size as to exactly hold all the loose parts when packed in a certain relation to one another, and the untiring swiftness with which the packer drew his supplies from their various bins and adjusted them in the box and nailed the lid upon them was fascinating in itself. I was sometimes employed in carting these boxes on a hand-truck, through a long run-way, to a warehouse and storing them there.