Once I was sent to the machine shop for "strap oil." I was thrown over a
greasy bench and was given it--the laying on of a heavy strap not at all
gently! I ran away, outraged, to tell my father; as I left, the men
seemed more attentive to their work than ever. They smiled quietly to
themselves.

In the comb department the throwing of chunks of composite was the
workers' chief diversion. And if you were strange there, you were sure
to be hit as you passed through.

The acid house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards
around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of
some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company
could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little of
America.... Swedes mostly ... attentive churchgoers on Sunday,--who on
week-days, and overtime at nights, laboured their lives out among the
pungent, lung-eating vats of acid. The fumes rose in yellow clouds. Each
man wore something over his nose and mouth resembling a sponge. But
many, grown careless, or through a silly code of mistaken manliness,
dispensed with this safeguard part of the time. And whether they
dispensed with it or not, the lives of the workers in the acid house was
not much more than a matter of a few years ... big, hulking, healthy
Swedes, newly arrived, with roses in their cheeks like fair, young
girls, faded perceptibly from day to day, into hollow-cheeked,
jaundice-coloured death's-heads. They went about, soon, with eyes that
had grey gaunt hollows about them--pits already cavernous like the
eye-pits of a skull.

* * * * *