My return to mill-work involved making acquaintance with a new kind of machinery. The spinning-room was the only one I had hitherto known anything about. Now my sister Emilie found a place for me in the dressing-room, beside herself. It was more airy, and fewer girls were in the room, for the dressing-frame itself was a large, clumsy affair, that occupied a great deal of space. Mine seemed to me as unmanageable as an overgrown spoilt child. It had to be watched in a dozen directions every minute, and even then it was always getting itself and me into trouble. I felt as if the half-live creature, with its great, groaning joints and whizzing fan, was aware of my incapacity to manage it, and had a fiendish spite against me. I contracted an unconquerable dislike to it; indeed, I had never liked, and never could learn to like, any kind of machinery. And this machine finally conquered me. It was humiliating, but I had to acknowledge that there were some things I could not do, and I retired from the field, vanquished.
The two things I had enjoyed in this room were that my sister was with me, and that our windows looked toward the west. When the work was running smoothly, we looked out together and quoted to each other all the sunset-poetry we could remember. Our tastes did not quite agree. Her favorite description of the clouds was from Pollok:—
"They seemed like chariots of saints,
By fiery coursers drawn; as brightly hued
As if the glorious, bushy, golden locks
Of thousand cherubim had been shorn off,
And on the temples hung of morn and even."
I liked better a translation from the German, beginning
"Methinks it were no pain to die
On such an eve, while such a sky
O'ercanopies the west."
And she generally had to hear the whole poem, for I was very fond of it; though the especial verse that I contrasted with hers was,—
"There's peace and welcome in yon sea
Of endless blue tranquillity;
Those clouds are living things;
I trace their veins of liquid gold,
And see them silently unfold
Their soft and fleecy wings."
Then she would tell me that my nature inclined to quietness and harmony, while hers asked for motion and splendor. I wondered whether it really were so. But that huge, creaking framework beside us would continually intrude upon our meditations and break up our discussions, and silence all poetry for us with its dull prose.
Emilie found more profitable work elsewhere, and I found some that was less so, but far more satisfactory, as it would give me the openings of leisure which I craved.
The paymaster asked, when I left, "Going where on can earn more money?"