arboreal ancestry.

This particular memory never came to Johnny in broad daylight when he was
wide awake. It came at night, in bed, at the moment that his consciousness
was sinking down and losing itself in sleep. It always aroused him to
frightened wakefulness, and for the moment, in the first sickening start,
it seemed to him that he lay crosswise on the foot of the bed. In the bed
were the vague forms of his father and mother. He never saw what his
father looked like. He had but one impression of his father, and that was
that he had savage and pitiless feet.

His earlier memories lingered with him, but he had no late memories. All
days were alike. Yesterday or last year were the same as a thousand years-
-or a minute. Nothing ever happened. There were no events to mark the
march of time. Time did not march. It stood always still. It was only
the whirling machines that moved, and they moved nowhere--in spite of the
fact that they moved faster.



When he was fourteen, he went to work on the starcher. It was a colossal
event. Something had at last happened that could be remembered beyond a
night's sleep or a week's pay-day. It marked an era. It was a machine
Olympiad, a thing to date from. "When I went to work on the starcher," or,
"after," or "before I went to work on the starcher," were sentences often
on his lips.

He celebrated his sixteenth birthday by going into the loom room and taking
a loom. Here was an incentive again, for it was piece-work. And he
excelled, because the clay of him had been moulded by the mills into the