In a great factory, almost grand from its vastness and the might of its machinery, though without architectural elegance or æsthetical design, a long file of girls were working at their noisy looms. Most of them presented the common type of the factory girl, the independence, the self-assertion, the love of snatches of finery in the shape of necklaces and earrings, in the middle of the dusty clothes, with their bursts of gossip and merriment at every pause in their routine. One girl was an exception. She worked in a corner, told off by a necessary angle of the building from the stands of her companions. She preferred that situation, and had selected it without opposition. She was not better dressed than her neighbours; she had the ordinary calico gown, and the cap with which the wise ones protected their heads from the fluff flying through the room. If there was
