Not a syllable was breathed. Nothing was heard but the low, steady overruling hum of the iron animals. The human voice was banished from the spot. Machinery—that vaunted slave of humanity—here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan. The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels.

All this scene around me was instantaneously taken in at one sweeping glance—even before I had proceeded to unwind the heavy tippet from around my neck. But as soon as this fell from me, the dark-complexioned man, standing close by, raised a sudden cry, and seizing my arm, dragged me out into the open air, and without pausing for a word instantly caught up some congealed snow and began rubbing both my cheeks.

‘Two white spots like the whites of your eyes,’ he said; ‘man, your cheeks are frozen.’

‘That may well be,’ muttered I; ‘’tis some wonder the frost of the Devil’s Dungeon strikes in no deeper. Rub away.’

Soon a horrible, tearing pain caught at my reviving cheeks. Two gaunt bloodhounds, one on each side, seemed mumbling them. I seemed Actaeon.

Presently, when all was over, I re-entered the factory, made known my business, concluded it satisfactorily, and then begged to be conducted throughout the place to view it.

‘Cupid is the boy for that,’ said the dark-complexioned man. ‘Cupid!’ and by this odd fancy-name calling a dimpled, red-cheeked, spirited-looking, forward little fellow, who was rather impudently, I thought, gliding about among the passive-looking girls—like a goldfish through hueless waves—yet doing nothing in particular that I could see, the man bade him lead the stranger through the edifice.

‘Come first and see the water-wheel,’ said this lively lad, with the air of boyishly-brisk importance.

Quitting the folding-room, we crossed some damp, cold boards, and stood beneath a great wet shed, incessantly showering with foam, like the green barnacled bow of some East Indiaman in a gale. Round and round here went the enormous revolutions of the dark colossal water-wheel, grim with its one immutable purpose.

‘This sets our whole machinery a-going, sir; in every part of all these buildings; where the girls work and all.’

I looked, and saw that the turbid waters of Blood River had not changed their hue by coming under the use of man.

‘You make only blank paper; no printing of any sort, I suppose? All blank paper, don’t you?’

‘Certainly; what else should a paper-factory make?’

The lad here looked at me as if suspicious of my common-sense.

‘Oh, to be sure!’ said I, confused and stammering; ‘it only struck me as so strange that red waters should turn out pale chee—paper, I mean.’

He took me up a wet and rickety stair to a great light room, furnished with no visible thing but rude, manger-like receptacles running all round its sides; and up to these mangers, like so many mares haltered to the rack, stood rows of girls. Before each was vertically thrust up a long, glittering scythe, immovably fixed at bottom to the manger-edge. The curve of the scythe, and its having no snath to it, made it look exactly like a sword. To and fro, across the sharp edge, the girls forever dragged long strips of rags, washed white, picked from baskets at one side, thus ripping asunder every seam, and converting the