Short Stories
acts with both hands were performed simultaneously and swift-
ly. Then there would come a flash of his hands as he looped the
weaver's knot and released the bobbin. There was nothing diffi-
cult about weaver's knots. He once boasted he could tie them in
his sleep. And for that matter, he sometimes did, toiling centu-
ries long in a single night at tying an endless succession of weav-
er's knots.
Some of the boys shirked, wasting time and machinery by
not replacing the small bobbins when they ran out. And there
was an overseer to prevent this. He caught Johnny's neighbor at
the trick, and boxed his ears.
"Look at Johnny there—why ain't you like him?" the overseer
wrathfully demanded.
Johnny's bobbins were running full blast, but he did not thrill
at the indirect praise. There had been a time . . . but that was
long ago, very long ago. His apathetic face was expressionless as
he listened to himself being held up as a shining example. He
was the perfect worker. He knew that. He had been told so, of-
ten. It was a commonplace, and besides it didn't seem to mean
anything to him any more. From the perfect worker he had
evolved into the perfect machine. When his work went wrong, it
was with him as with the machine, due to faulty material. It
would have been as possible for a perfect nail-die to cut imper-
fect nails as for him to make a mistake.
And small wonder. There had never been a time when he
had not been in intimate relationship with machines. Machinery
had almost been bred into him, and at any rate he had been
brought up on it. Twelve years before, there had been a small
flutter of excitement in the loom room of this very mill. Johnny's
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