Short Stories
tension, and the result was that he grew nervous. At night his
muscles twitched in his sleep, and in the daytime he could not
relax and rest. He remained keyed up and his muscles continued
to twitch. Also he grew sallow and his lint-cough grew worse.
Then pneumonia laid hold of the feeble lungs within the con-
tracted chest, and he lost his job in the glass-works. Now he had
returned to the jute mills where he had first begun with winding
bobbins. But promotion was waiting for him. He was a good
worker. He would next go on the starcher, and later he would go
into the loom room. There was nothing after that except in-
creased efficiency.
The machinery ran faster than when he had first gone to
work, and his mind ran slower. He no longer dreamed at all,
though his earlier years had been full of dreaming. Once he had
been in love. It was when he first began guiding the cloth over
the hot roller, and it was with the daughter of the superinten-
dent. She was much older than he, a young woman, and he had
seen her at a distance only a paltry half-dozen times. But that
made no difference. On the surface of the cloth stream that
poured past him, he pictured radiant futures wherein he per-
formed prodigies of toil, invented miraculous machines, won to
the mastership of the mills, and in the end took her in his arms
and kissed her soberly on the brow.
But that was all in the long ago, before he had grown too old
and tired to love. Also, she had married and gone away, and his
mind had gone to sleep. Yet it had been a wonderful experience,
and he used often to look back upon it as other men and women
look back upon the time they believed in fairies. He had never
believed in fairies nor Santa Claus; but he had believed implicit-
ly in the smiling future his imagination had wrought into the
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