And the marvel of it was in the completeness of the clearing. The unrestrained vent of ill-temper would be followed by no harboring of malice. It was as though the men, who had freed themselves of a load of ill-feeling, were prepared to continue unhampered in the ease of agreeable association. The secret of it lay, I presume, in the absence of malignant antagonisms. The distempers were merely the results of the common attrition of life. At bottom these hard-working, self-respecting persons respected and liked one another, and in the intimacy of the crowded tenement they lived in relative comfort on no other possible terms than those of common liking and respect. The factory itself further illustrated the periodic unevennesses of temper. Not that they were strictly periodic in the home. Mondays were apt to witness them, but there was no normal regularity in their occurrence, for they might crop out at any time. But Monday mornings in the factory were almost fatally sure of their emergence. You could not escape the feeling of unwonted disturbance both in the humor of the men and in the progress of their work. But nothing could have been more potent in coaxing them again into an accordant frame of mind than the routine of factory labor. The very doing of what had become to them a second nature by a quickness of hand which itself was a mark of mastery, seemed to win them back to cheerful acceptance of life. I have often seen the men at the boarding-house leave the breakfast-table in moods that “varied mostly for the worse,” and return to it at noon in high spirits that were finely attune. There is a monotony about piece-work which must take on at times the quality of a maddening horror. I can bear no personal testimony to it, because I did not rise to the position of a piece-worker. The phases of the system which I saw, however, in the limited insight into its practical working to be gained in my range in the factory as a common laborer, impressed me rather with its advantages. Among the day-laborers here there was apparent at once the same deadly uninterest in their work which is characteristic of their class in the present ordering of such labor. The attitude is that of irresponsible school-boys in their feeling of natural hostility to their masters in the mutual struggle over the prescribed tasks. But among the laborers it takes on the tragedy of the relation of grown men to the serious business of their lives. Interest in their work? Not the faintest. Sense of responsibility for it? Not the dimmest. Any day you could see the bearded father of a family shirk his task in a momentary absence of the boss, or steal truant minutes from his time in idling on an errand, with as puerile a spirit as that which prompts a stroke of mischief in school-hours.