There Mary Jane worked with other girls in a long dreary room, where
giants sat pounding wool into a long thread-like strip with iron,
rasping hands. And all day long they roared as they sat at their
soulless work. But the work of Mary Jane was not with these, only
their roar was ever in her ears as their clattering iron limbs went
to and fro.

Her work was to tend a creature smaller, but infinitely more
cunning.

It took the strip of wool that the giants had threshed, and whirled
it round and round until it had twisted it into hard thin thread.
Then it would make a clutch with fingers of steel at the thread that
it had gathered, and waddle away about five yards and come back with
more.

It had mastered all the subtlety of skilled workers, and had
gradually displaced them; one thing only it could not do, it was
unable to pick up the ends if a piece of the thread broke, in order
to tie them together again. For this a human soul was required, and
it was Mary Jane's business to pick up broken ends; and the moment
she placed them together the busy soulless creature tied them for
itself.

All here was ugly; even the green wool as it whirled round and round
was neither the green of the grass nor yet the green of the rushes,
but a sorry muddy green that befitted a sullen city under a murky
sky.