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'I think I was well when mother died, but I have never been rightly strong sin' somewhere about that time. I began to work in a carding-room soon after, and the fluff got into my lungs and poisoned me. 'Fluff? said Margaret, inquiringly. 'Fluff, repeated Bessy. 'Little bits, as fly off fro' the cotton, when they're carding it, and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust.
They say it winds round the lungs, and tightens them up. Anyhow, there's many a one as works in a carding-room, that falls into a waste, coughing and spitting blood, because they're just poisoned by the fluff. 'But can't it be helped? asked Margaret. 'I dunno.
But as they passed from one resounding room to the other from the dull throb of the carding-room, the groan of the ply-frames, the long steady pound of the slashers, back to the angry shriek of the fierce unappeasable looms the light faded from her eyes and she looked merely bewildered and stunned.
Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain that the accident was due to his own carelessness; but the hands say that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later." Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do you say?" "That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded.
An operative may be ever so expert with his fingers, and yet not learn to measure his ordinary movements quite as accurately as if he were an automaton; and that is what a man must do to be safe in the carding-room." She sighed again. "The more you tell me, the more difficult it all seems. Why is the carding-room so over-crowded?"
Once out of it all, she would make haste to forget the dreary scene without pausing to ask for any explanation of its dreariness. And then, as he despaired of it, the change came. They had entered the principal carding-room, and were half-way down its long central passage, when Mr. Tredegar, who led the procession, paused before one of the cards.
He tried to put the facts succinctly, presenting them in their bare ugliness, without emotional drapery; setting forth Dillon's good record for sobriety and skill, dwelling on the fact that his wife's ill-health was the result of perfectly remediable conditions in the work-rooms, and giving his reasons for the belief that the accident had been caused, not by Dillon's carelessness, but by the over-crowding of the carding-room.
Apropos of the burning of the Amazon: M. Dujardin relates, that a fire broke out a short time since in a spinning-mill at Douai. It penetrated to the carding-room; destruction seemed inevitable, and the engines were sent for, when it was proposed to fill the blazing room with steam.
"A new hand, then," he said, with a little more suavity. "We need another hand in the carding-room, so you may go there. I will show you the room." He led the way, Margaret following, yet keeping close to her new friend. The noise of the room was almost as great as that of the other, but it was sunnier, and the windows were adorned with some beautiful plants.
The intervals were spent frolicking around around the spinning-frames, teasing and talking to the older girls, or entertaining ourselves with the games and stories in a corner, or exploring with the overseer's permission, the mysteries of the the carding-room, the dressing-room and the weaving-room. I never cared much for machinery.
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