_Snap--bang! Snap--bang!_ One hundred and twenty times--_Snap--bang!_ and back again, went the deft little workers pushing their cart before them. Full at last, their cart is whirled away with flying heels to another machine. It was a steady, lightning, endless track. Their little trained fingers betook of their surroundings and worked like fingers of steel. Their legs seemed made of India rubber. Their eyes shot out right and left, left and right, looking for the broken threads on the whirling bobbins as hawks sweep over the marsh grass looking for mice, and the steel claws, which swooped down on the bobbins when they found it, made the simile not unsuitable. Young as she was, Shiloh managed one of these harnessed, fiery lines of dancing witches, pirouetting on boards of hardened oak or hickory. Up and down she walked--up and down, watching these endless whirling figures, her bare fingers pitted against theirs of brass, her bare feet against theirs shod with iron, her little head against theirs insensate and unpitying, her little heart against theirs of flame which throbbed in the boiler's bosom and drove its thousand steeds with a whip of fire. In the bloodiest and cruelest days of the Roman Empire, man was matched against wild beasts. But in the man's hand was the blade of his ancestors and over his breast the steel ribs which had helped his people to conquer the world. And in the Beast's body was a heart! Ay, and the man was a man--a trained gladiator--and he was nerved by the cheers of thousands of sympathizing spectators. And now, centuries after, and in the age of so-called kindness, comes this battle to be fought over. And the fight, now as then, is for bread and life. But how cruelly unfair is the fight of to-day, when the weak and helpless child is made the gladiator, and the fight is for bread, and the Beast is of steel and steam, and is soulless and heartless. Steel--that by which the old gladiator conquered--that is the heart of the Thing the little one must fight. And the cheers--the glamour of it is lacking, for the little one cannot hear even the sound of its own voice--in the roar of the thousand-throated Thing which drives the Steel Beast on. Seven o'clock--eight o'clock--Shiloh's head swam--her shoulders ached, her ears quivered with sensitiveness, and seemed not to catch sounds any more, but sharp and shooting pains. She was dazed already and weak; but still the Steam Thing cheered its steel legions on. Up and down, up and down she walked, her baby thoughts coming to her as through the roar of a Niagara, through pain and sensitiveness, through aches and a dull, never-ending sameness. Nine o'clock! Oh, she was so tired of it all!