All day long and into the night, they must walk up and down, between these two rows of spinning-frames, amid the whirling spindles, piecing the broken threads which were forever breaking.
It did not require strength, but a certain skill, which, unfortunately, childhood possessed more than the adult. Not power, but dexterity, watchfulness, quickness and the ability to walk--as children walk--and watch--as age should watch.
No wonder that in a few months the child becomes, not the flesh and blood of its heredity, but the steel and wood of its environment.
Bull Run and Seven Days were doffers, and confined to the same set of frames. They followed their sisters, taking off the full bobbins and throwing them into a cart and thrusting an empty bobbin into its place. This requires an eye of lightning and a hand with the quickness of its stroke.
For it must be done between the pulsings of the Big Thing's heart--a flash, a snap, a snarl of broken thread--up in the left hand flies the bobbin from its disentanglement of thread and skein, and down over the buzzing point of steel spindles settles the empty bobbin, thrust over the spindle by the right.
It is all done with two quick movements--a flash and a jerk of one hand up, and the other down, the eye riveted to the nicety of a hair's breadth, the stroke downward gauged to the cup of a thimble, to settle over the point of the spindle's end; for the missing of a thread's breadth would send a spindle blade through the hand, or tangle and snap a thread which was turning with a thousand revolutions in a minute.
_Snap--bang! Snap--bang!_ One hundred and twenty times--_Snap--bang!_ and back again, went the deft little workers pushing their cart before them.
Full at last, their cart is whirled away with flying heels to another machine.
It was a steady, lightning, endless track. Their little trained fingers betook of their surroundings and worked like fingers of steel. Their legs seemed made of India rubber. Their eyes shot out right and left, left and right, looking for the broken threads on the whirling bobbins as hawks sweep over the marsh grass looking for mice, and the steel claws, which swooped down on the bobbins when they found it, made the simile not unsuitable.