tatters almost into lint. The air swam with the fine, poisonous particles, which from all sides darted, subtilely, as motes in sunbeams, into the lungs.

‘This is the rag-room,’ coughed the boy.

‘You find it rather stifling here,’ coughed I, in answer; ‘but the girls don’t cough.’

‘Oh, they are used to it.’

‘Where do you get such hosts of rags?’ picking up a handful from a basket.

‘Some from the country round about; some from far over sea—Leghorn and London.’

‘’Tis not unlikely, then,’ murmured I, ‘that among these heaps of rags there may be some old shirts, gathered from the dormitories of the Paradise of Bachelors. But the buttons are all dropped off. Pray, my lad, do you ever find any bachelors’ buttons hereabouts?’

‘None grow in this part of the country. The Devil’s Dungeon is no place for flowers.’

‘Oh! you mean the flowers so called—the Bachelor’s Buttons?’

‘And was not that what you asked about? Or did you mean the gold bosom-buttons of our boss, Old Bach, as our whispering girls all call him?’

‘The man, then, I saw below is a bachelor, is he?’

‘Oh, yes, he’s a Bach.’

‘The edges of those swords, they are turned outward from the girls, if I see right; but their rags and fingers fly so, I cannot distinctly see.’

‘Turned outward.’

Yes, murmured I to myself; I see it now; turned outward; and each erected sword is so borne, edge-outward, before each girl. If my reading fails me not, just so, of old, condemned state-prisoners went from the hall of judgment to their doom; an officer before, bearing a sword, its edge turned outward, in significance of their fatal sentence. So, through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white girls to death.

‘Those scythes look very sharp,’ again turning towards the boy.

‘Yes; they have to keep them so. Look!’

That moment two of the girls, dropping their rags, plied each a whetstone up and down the sword-blade. My unaccustomed blood curdled at the sharp shriek of the tormented steel.

Their own executioners; themselves whetting the very swords that slay them, meditated I.

‘What makes those girls so sheet-white, my lad?’

‘Why’—with a roguish twinkle, pure ignorant drollery, not knowing heartlessness—‘I suppose the handling of such white bits of sheets all the time makes them so sheety.’

‘Let us leave the rag-room now, my lad.’

More tragical and more inscrutably mysterious than any mystic sight, human or machine, throughout the factory, was the strange innocence of cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy.