that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of St Veronica.

‘Halloa! the heat of the room is too much for you,’ cried Cupid, staring at me.

‘No—I am rather chill, if anything.’

‘Come out, sir—out—out,’ and, with the protecting air of a careful father, the precocious lad hurried me outside.

In a few moments, feeling revived a little, I went into the folding-room—the first room I had entered, and where the desk for transacting business stood, surrounded by the blank counters and blank girls engaged at them.

‘Cupid here had led me a strange tour,’ said I to the dark-complexioned man before mentioned, whom I had ere this discovered not only to be an old bachelor, but also the principal proprietor. ‘Yours is a most wonderful factory. Your great machine is a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.’

‘Yes, all our visitors think it so. But we don’t have many. We are in a very out-of-the-way corner here. Few inhabitants, too. Most of our girls come from far-off villages.’

‘The girls,’ echoed I, glancing round at their silent forms. ‘Why is it, sir, that in most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are indiscriminately called girls, never women?’

‘Oh! as to that—why, I suppose, the fact of their being generally unmarried—that’s the reason, I should think. But it never struck me before. For our factory here we will not have married women; they are apt to be off-and-on too much. We want none but steady workers: twelve hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and sixty-five days, excepting Sundays, Thanksgiving and fast-days. That’s our rule. And so, having no married women, what females we have are rightly enough called girls.’

‘Then these are all maids,’ said I, while some pained homage to their pale virginity made me involuntarily bow.

‘All maids.’

Again the strange emotion filled me.

‘Your cheeks look whitish yet, sir,’ said the man, gazing at me narrowly. ‘You must be careful going home. Do they pain you at all now? It’s a bad sign, if they do.’

‘No doubt, sir,’ answered I, ‘when once I have got out of the Devil’s Dungeon, I shall feel them mending.’

‘Ah, yes; the winter air in valleys, or gorges, or any sunken place, is far colder and more bitter than elsewhere. You would hardly believe it now, but it is colder here than at the top of Woedolor Mountain.’

‘I dare say it is, sir. But time presses me; I must depart.’

With that, remuffling myself in dreadnaught and tippet, thrusting my hands into my huge sealskin mittens, I sallied out into the nipping air, and found poor Black, my horse, all cringing and doubled up with the cold.

Soon, wrapped in furs and meditations, I ascended from the Devil’s Dungeon.

At the Black Notch I paused, and once more bethought me of Temple Bar. Then, shooting through the pass, all alone with inscrutable nature, I exclaimed—Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!