Page:Between Two Loves.djvu/12

Rh Each worker attended to two looms, and most of them were singing as they watched the shuttles glide swiftly between the webs, and the wefts slowly welding themselves to the warps, and growing into soft merinos and lustrous alpacas. Burley, standing within the door of the long weaving-room, saw everything with a comprehensive eye. He was fond of singing, and he listened with pleasure to the clear, throstle-like warbling of a girl in some solo part, and the stirring chorus lifted by twenty voices around her. It was a favorite hymn of his, and it touched him somewhat, he had no objection to hear its triumphant strains mingling with the clicking of the machinery and the clack of the wayward shuttles; he knew well that men and women who sing at their labor put a good heart into it.

Nature has made many fine fellows in her time, and she meant Jonathan Burley for one of them. He had a grand physique, good mental abilities, and a spiritual nature of quick and lofty sympathies. But when the passion of fortune-making gets hold of a man, it robs, in greater or less degree, all his faculties. So, though the hymn touched some sentiment far