“What’s your job?”
“Sweepin’,” he grinned.
“How much do you make a day!”
“Twenty cents.”
“How old are you!”
“Seayvun.”
The boy at the machine, making bands for the spindles, was “goin’ on tayun.” He earned twenty cents a day. Others, I learned, were eight, nine and ten, and occasionally there was one as old as twelve.
As I walked on now through the mills talking with a twelve-year-old red-headed girl who had been four years at work, my eyes suddenly fell upon a strange couple. I could not take my attention from the tinier of the tiny pair; the boy’s hands appeared to be made without bones, his thumb flew back almost double as he pressed the cotton to loosen it from the revolving roller in the spinning frame; they no longer moved, these yellow, anemic hands, as though directed in their different acts by a thinking intelligence; they performed mechanically the gestures which had given them their definite form.
The red-headed girl laughed and nodded in the direction of the dwarfs.
“He’s most six,” she said. “He’s been here two years. He come in when he was most four. His little brother most four’s workin’ here now.”