The mule-room atmosphere was kept at from eighty-five to ninety degrees of heat. The hardwood floor burned my bare feet. I had to gasp quick, short gasps to get air into my lungs at all. My face seemed swathed in continual fire. The tobacco chewers expectorated on the floor, and left little pools for me to wade through. Oil and hot grease dripped down behind the mules, sometimes falling on my scalp or making yellow splotches on my overalls or feet. Under the excessive heat my body was like a soft sponge in the fingers of a giant; perspiration oozed from me until it seemed inevitable that I should melt away at last. To open a window was a great crime, as the cotton fiber was so sensitive to wind that it would spoil. (Poor cotton fiber!) When the mill was working, the air in the mule-room was filled with a swirling, almost invisible cloud of lint, which settled on floor, machinery, and employees, as snow falls in winter. I breathed it down my nostrils ten and a half hours a day; it worked into my hair, and was gulped down my throat. This lint was laden with dust, dust of every conceivable sort, and not friendly at all to lungs. There are few prison rules more stringent than the rules I worked under in that mule-room. There are few prisoners watched with sterner guards than were the bosses who watched and ordered me from this task to that. There was a rule against looking out of a window. The cotton mills did not have opaque glass or whitewashed windows, then. There was a rule against reading during work-hours. There was a rule preventing us from talking to one another. There was a rule prohibiting us from leaving the mill during work-hours. We were not supposed to sit down, even though we had caught up with our work. We were never supposed to stop work, even when we could. There was a rule that anyone coming to work a minute late would lose his work. The outside watchman always closed the gate the instant the starting whistle sounded, so that anyone unfortunate enough to be outside had to go around to the office, lose time, and find a stranger on his job, with the prospect of being out of work for some time to come. For the protection of minors like myself, two notices were posted in the room, and in every room of the mill. They were rules that represented what had been done in public agitation for the protection of such as I: rules which, if carried out, would have taken much of the danger and the despair from my mill life. They read: “The cleaning of machinery while it is in motion is positively forbidden!” “All Minors are hereby prohibited from working during the regular stopping hours!”