"RebeccaHardingDavis-LifeInTheIronMills" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Rebecca Harding)

black shadows with a pitiful fright.
"I was alone," she said, timidly.
"Where's the father?" asked Deborah, holding out a potato, which the girl
greedily seized.
"He's beyant,--wid Haley,--in the stone house." (Did you ever hear the word tail
from an Irish mouth?) "I came here. Hugh told me never to stay me-lone."
"Hugh?"
"Yes."
A vexed frown crossed her face. The girl saw it, and added quickly,--
"I have not seen Hugh the day, Deb. The old man says his watch lasts till the
mornin'."
The woman sprang up, and hastily began to arrange some bread and flitch in a tin
pail, and to pour her own measure of ale into a bottle. Tying on her bonnet, she
blew out the candle.
"Lay ye down, Janey dear," she said, gently, covering her with the old rags.
"Hur can eat the potatoes, if hur's hungry.
"Where are ye goin', Deb? The rain's sharp."
"To the mill, with Hugh's supper."
"Let him bide till th' morn. Sit ye down."
"No, no,"--sharply pushing her off. "The boy'll starve."
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-off thunder.
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.