[Illustration: WAITING FOR A JOB OUTSIDE THE FACTORY GATES.]
The sudden on-rush of factory-hands was almost a miracle. Men seemed to rise as by magic from the soil. They streamed from neighboring tenements, and along the wooden sidewalks, and from out the horse-cars which came down the streets loaded to the couplers. They had grown to the number of an army, and in rough, uneven, changing ranks they walked briskly, five, six, nine men abreast, while the bell tapped off nervously the swift approach of seven o’clock. Two men seated in a buggy drove their horse slowly into the thick of the crowd, which deflected at the gate to let them pass, and then closed in behind with increased momentum. The superintendent of the factory stepped down from the buggy and climbed the staircase to his office.
The converging lines of workmen made denser the mass that pressed quickly through the gate. There was little speech among them, and the noise they made was the shuffling, broken step of an unorganized crowd. But there was not wanting the inspiration of a moving throng of men. Some of them were old and much bent with pain and labor, and there were boys in the crowd who could be but little beyond their first decade of life, but the great body of the hands were young men between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. One could trace upon these faces all the stages of life’s handicraft, in distorting human countenances into grotesque variations from all normal types of beauty, and bringing out upon them, in infinite variety, individual expressions of aggressive power and the strength which comes of long endurance. Ah, the hideous ugliness of the race to which we belong, and yet the more than beauty of it in the strong lines it bears of honest work faithfully done and of pain and sorrow bravely borne!
With the last sharp ringing of the bell there was a sudden rush of the living stream of workers, and then it abruptly ceased, and we, the unemployed, stood at both sides along the high board fence, like so much useless foam tossed off by the swift current which had poured through the narrow gate. The keeper began a monotonous march up and down the opening before his sentry-box. He was a muscular, blue-eyed Irishman of fifty-five or sixty, and he was in no wise ignorant of his business. There was nothing to indicate that he was aware of the presence of the crowd of expectant men, until some of us pressed too near to the gate in our anxiety to catch sight of a foreman in search of extra hands, and then he ordered us back with a violence which showed that we were one of the pests of his existence.