hearts heretofore light with youth.

When I have fitted 110 dozen tin caps the forewoman comes and changes my
job. She tells me to haul and load up some heavy crates with pickle
jars. I am wheeling these back and forth when the twelve o'clock whistle
blows. Up to that time the room has been one big dynamo, each girl a
part of it. With the first moan of the noon signal the dynamo comes to
life. It is hungry; it has friends and favourites--news to tell. We herd
down to a big dining-room and take our places, five hundred of us in
all. The newspaper bundles are unfolded. The ménu varies little: bread
and jam, cake and pickles, occasionally a sausage, a bit of cheese or a
piece of stringy cold meat. In ten minutes the repast is over. The
dynamo has been fed; there are twenty minutes of leisure spent in
dancing, singing, resting, and conversing chiefly about young men and
"sociables."

At 12:30 sharp the whistle draws back the life it has given. I return to
my job. My shoulders are beginning to ache. My hands are stiff, my
thumbs almost blistered. The enthusiasm I had felt is giving way to a
numbing weariness. I look at my companions now in amazement. How can
they keep on so steadily, so swiftly? Cases are emptied and refilled;
bottles are labeled, stamped and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and
loaded, and still there are more cases, more jars, more bottles. Oh! the
monotony of it, the never-ending supply of work to be begun and
finished, begun and finished, begun and finished! Now and then some one
cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh; once the mustard
machine broke--and still the work goes on, on, on! New girls like
myself, who had worked briskly in the morning, are beginning to loiter.
Out of the washing-tins hands come up red and swollen, only to be
plunged again into hot dirty water. Would the whistle never blow? Once I