waist he carried a bundle of twine. He held the bottles between his knees
so that he might work with both hands. Thus, in a sitting position and
bending over his own knees, his narrow shoulders grew humped and his chest
was contracted for ten hours each day. This was not good for the lungs,
but he tied three hundred dozen bottles a day.

The superintendent was very proud of him, and brought visitors to look at
him. In ten hours three hundred dozen bottles passed through his hands.
This meant that he had attained machine-like perfection. All waste
movements were eliminated. Every motion of his thin arms, every movement
of a muscle in the thin fingers, was swift and accurate. He worked at high
tension, and the result was that he grew nervous. At night his muscles
twitched in his sleep, and in the daytime he could not relax and rest. He
remained keyed up and his muscles continued to twitch. Also he grew sallow
and his lint-cough grew worse. Then pneumonia laid hold of the feeble
lungs within the contracted chest, and he lost his job in the glass-works.

Now he had returned to the jute mills where he had first begun with winding
bobbins. But promotion was waiting for him. He was a good worker. He
would next go on the starcher, and later he would go into the loom room.
There was nothing after that except increased efficiency.

The machinery ran faster than when he had first gone to work, and his mind
ran slower. He no longer dreamed at all, though his earlier years had been
full of dreaming. Once he had been in love. It was when he first began
guiding the cloth over the hot roller, and it was with the daughter of the
superintendent. She was much older than he, a young woman, and he had seen
her at a distance only a paltry half-dozen times. But that made no
difference. On the surface of the cloth stream that poured past him, he
pictured radiant futures wherein he performed prodigies of toil, invented