- end_line
- 4109
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:56.336Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 4039
- text
- "And was not that what you asked about? Or did you mean the gold
bosom-buttons of our boss, Old Bach, as our whispering girls all call
him?"
"The man, then, I saw below is a bachelor, is he?"
"Oh, yes, he's a Bach."
"The edges of those swords, they are turned outward from the girls, if
I see right; but their rags and fingers fly so, I can not distinctly
see."
"Turned outward."
Yes, murmured I to myself; I see it now; turned outward; and each
erected sword is so borne, edge-outward, before each girl. If my
reading fails me not, just so, of old, condemned state-prisoners went
from the hall of judgment to their doom; an officer before, bearing
a sword, its edge turned outward, in significance of their fatal
sentence. So, through consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go
these white girls to death.
"Those scythes look very sharp," again turning toward the boy.
"Yes; they have to keep them so. Look!"
That moment two of the girls, dropping their rags, plied each a
whetstone up and down the sword-blade. My unaccustomed blood curdled at
the sharp shriek of the tormented steel.
Their own executioners; themselves whetting the very swords that slay
them; meditated I.
"What makes those girls so sheet-white, my lad?"
"Why"--with a roguish twinkle, pure ignorant drollery, not knowing
heartlessness--"I suppose the handling of such white bits of sheets all
the time makes them so sheety."
"Let us leave the rag-room now, my lad."
More tragical and more inscrutably mysterious than any mystic sight,
human or machine, throughout the factory, was the strange innocence of
cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy.
"And now," said he, cheerily, "I suppose you want to see our great
machine, which cost us twelve thousand dollars only last autumn. That's
the machine that makes the paper, too. This way, Sir."
Following him I crossed a large, bespattered place, with two great
round vats in it, full of a white, wet, woolly-looking stuff, not
unlike the albuminous part of an egg, soft-boiled.
"There," said Cupid, tapping the vats carelessly, "these are the first
beginning of the paper; this white pulp you see. Look how it swims
bubbling round and round, moved by the paddle here. From hence it pours
from both vats into the one common channel yonder; and so goes, mixed
up and leisurely, to the great machine. And now for that."
He led me into a room, stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal
heat, as if here, true enough, were being finally developed the
germinous particles lately seen.
Before me, rolled out like some long Eastern manuscript, lay stretched
one continuous length of iron framework--multitudinous and mystical,
with all sorts of rollers, wheels, and cylinders, in slowly-measured
and unceasing motion.
"Here first comes the pulp now," said Cupid, pointing to the nighest
end of the machine.
- title
- Chunk 6