But, oh, the mockery and vanity of all efforts, even my wild ones, to master one of those machines! The lurching, halting, snapping things could not be mastered. Threads snapped faster than I could fasten them. One tie and two breaks, two ties and three breaks, along the row of glistening spindles, until there were so many broken threads that I had to stop the mule to catch up. And every stop meant the stoppage of wages, and the longer a thread stayed broken, the less I was earning; and on top of that, the bosses swore at us for stopping at all. I should have stopped work then and there--it would have been the sensible thing to do--but I was no loafer, and I was trying to make good in this new work--the end of a long desire. The other “joiners” and spinners did not try to keep at it. They gave up the work as soon as they discovered how useless it was to try to make a decent wage from the worn-out machines. Only myself and a few poor men who were there because they could not get any better place stayed on and fought the one-sided fight. Every time the machinery broke--and breaks were constant--the machinist grumbled, and took his own time in coming with his wrenches. The physical and mental reaction of all this upon me was most woeful. My muscles grew numb under the excessive pressure on them, so much so that I often stood still when the threads were snapping about me and looked on them as if I had never seen a broken thread before. Or I would suddenly stop in my wild dashes this way and that in the mending of threads and look dazedly about, feel a stifling half-sob coming to my throat, and my lips would tremble under the misery and hopelessness of it all. My only consolation, and very poor, too, lay in the clock. At six o’clock it would all end for a few hours at least, and I could get out of it all. But when you watch the clock under those circumstances, an hour becomes two, and one day two days. So the labor was, after all, a wild frenzy, a race and a stab and a sob for ten and a half hours! I can never think of it as anything more. Some of my work-fellows in that room were sent to jail for assault, petty thieving, and drunkenness. I used to think about them, in the jail, doing light work under healthy conditions, even though they were paying penalties for lawlessness, but I, who had done no crime, had to have ten hours and a half of that despairing contest with a machine. How much better to be sewing overalls or making brooms in a jail! I had to stay in the house at night in order to be thoroughly rested for the next day’s work. I had no liberty.