I liked to be sent to the other departments on errands. There were whirling wheels and steadily recurring, ever-lapsing belts ... and men and women working and working in thin fine dust, or among a strong smell as of rubbed amber--the characteristic smell of composite when subjected to friction.... And these men and women were continually joking and jesting and making horse-play at one another's expense, as rough people in their social unease do. They seemed part and adjunct to the machines, the workers! Strong, sturdy, bared forearms flashed regularly like moving, rhythmic shafts ... deft hands clasped and reached, making only necessary movements. Each department housed a different kind of worker. In the grinding, squealing, squeaking, buzzing machine shop the men were not mixed with women. They were alert, well-muscled; their faces were streaked with paleness and a black smutch like dancers made up for a masquerade. Always they were seeking for a vigorous joke to play on someone. And, if the trick were perpetrated within the code, the foreman himself enjoyed it, laughing grimly with the "boys." Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to themselves. In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure to be hit as you passed through. The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness, dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked, jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the eye-pits of a skull. * * * * * "Well, they don't _have_ to work in there unless they want to, do they?" "Ah, they're only a lot of foreigners anyhow." * * * * *