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-offthunder. 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

should receive small word of thanks.
Perhaps, if she had possessed an artist's eye, the picturesque

oddity of the scene might have made her step stagger less, and
the path seem shorter; but to her the mills were only "summat

deilish to look at by night."
The road leading to the mills had been quarried from the solid

rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-
covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on

the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-
like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side.

Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that
burned hot and fiercely" target="_blank" title="ad.凶猛地，残忍地">fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible

form: pits of flame waving in the wind; liquid metal-flames
writhing in tortuous streams through the sand; wide caldrons

filled with boiling fire, over which bent ghastly wretches
stirring the strange brewing; and through all, crowds of half-

clad men, looking like revengeful ghosts in the red light,
hurried, throwing masses of glittering fire. It was like a

street in Hell. Even Deborah muttered, as she crept through,
"looks like t' Devil's place!" It did,--in more ways than one.

She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on
a furnace. He had not time to eat his supper; so she went

behind the furnace, and waited. Only a few men were with him,
and they noticed her only by a "Hyur comes t'hunchback, Wolfe."

Deborah was stupid with sleep; her back pained her sharply; and
her teeth chattered with cold, with the rain that soaked her

clothes and dripped from her at every step. She stood, however,
patiently holding the pail, and waiting.

"Hout, woman! ye look like a drowned cat. Come near to the
fire,"--said one of the men, approaching to scrape away the

ashes.
She shook her head. Wolfe had forgotten her. He turned,

hearing the man, and came closer.
"I did no' think; gi' me my supper, woman.

She watched him eat with a painfuleagerness. With a woman's
quick instinct, she saw that he was not hungry,--was eating to

please her. Her pale, watery eyes began to gather a strange
light.

"Is't good, Hugh? T' ale was a bit sour, I feared."
"No, good enough." He hesitated a moment. "Ye're tired, poor

lass! Bide here till I go. Lay down there on that heap of ash,
and go to sleep."

He threw her an old coat for a pillow, and turned to his work.
The heap was the refuse of the burnt iron, and was not a hard

bed; the half-smothered warmth, too, penetrated her limbs,
dulling their pain and cold shiver.

Miserable enough she looked, lying there on the ashes like a
limp, dirty rag,--yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene

of hopelessdiscomfort and veiled crime: more fitting, if one
looked deeper into the heart of things, at her thwarted woman's

form, her colorless life, her waking stupor that smothered pain
and hunger,--even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper

yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this
wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul

filled with groping passionate" target="_blank" title="a.易动情的；易怒的">passionate love, heroic unselfishness,
fiercejealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one

human being whom she loved, to gain one look of real heart-
kindness from him? If anything like this were hidden beneath

the pale, bleared eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking face, no
one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs: not the

half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he was kind
to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats

that swarmed in the cellar: kind to her in just the same way.
She knew that. And it might be that very knowledge had given to

her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life.
One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest,

finest of women's faces,--in the very midst, it may be, of their
warmest summer's day; and then one can guess at the secret of

intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces
and brilliant smile. There was no warmth, no brilliancy, no

summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time to
gnaw into her face perpetually. She was young, too, though no

one guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.
She lay quiet in the dark corner, listening, through the

monotonous din and uncertain glare of the works, to the dull
plash of the rain in the far distance, shrinking back whenever

the man Wolfe happened to look towards her. She knew, in spite
of all his kindness, that there was that in her face and form

which made him loathe the sight of her. She felt by instinct,
although she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of the

man, which made him among his fellow-workmen something unique,
set apart. She knew, that, down under all the vileness and

coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever
was beautiful and pure, that his soul sickened with disgust at

her deformity, even when his words were kindest. Through this
dull consciousness, which never left her, came, like a sting,

the recollection of the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of the
little Irish girl she had left in the cellar. The recollection

struck through even her stupidintellect with a vivid glow of
beauty and of grace. Little Janey, timid, helpless, clinging to

Hugh as her only friend: that was the sharp thought, the bitter
thought, that drove into the glazed eyes a fierce light of pain.

You laugh at it? Are pain and jealousy less savage realities
down here in this place I am taking you to than in your own

house or your own heart,--your heart, which they clutch at
sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or

low.
If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out

from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their
lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no

ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-
starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the

besotted faces on the street,--I can paint nothing of this, only
give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life

of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath
you can read according to the eyes God has given you.