She hurried from the cellar, while the child wearily coiled
herself up for sleep. The rain was falling heavily, as the
woman, pail in hand, emerged from the mouth of the alley, and
turned down the narrow street, that stretched out, long and
black, miles before her. Here and there a flicker of gas
lighted an uncertain space of muddy footwalk and gutter; the
long rows of houses, except an occasional lager-bier shop, were
closed; now and then she met a band of millhands skulking to or
from their work.

Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know
the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are
governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands
of each mill are divided into watches that relieve each other as
regularly as the sentinels of an army. By night and day the
work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek, the fiery
pools of metal boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in
half-courtesy to public censure, the fires are partially veiled;
but as soon as the clock strikes midnight, the great furnaces
break forth with renewed fury, the clamor begins with fresh,
breathless vigor, the engines sob and shriek like "gods in
pain."

As Deborah hurried down through the heavy rain, the noise of
these thousand engines sounded through the sleep and shadow of
the city like far-off thunder. The mill to which she was going
lay on the river, a mile below the city-limits. It was far, and
she was weak, aching from standing twelve hours at the spools.
Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man his supper,
though at every square she sat down to rest, and she knew she