Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/100

826 the factory—are willing at times to smuggle in matches for a quiet smoke in a secluded corner. This quiet smoke may of course produce a much louder smoke in a corner not secluded, and is therefore rigidly banned. The discipline in the factory is most extraordinary, and to it must be attributed the marvelous immunity from accidents.

At this point, too, you get your first glimpse of the "costumes." A man in a Tam o' Shanter cap comes up clothed from head to foot in vivid scarlet. He belongs to a nitroglycerin house. Then comes a man in dark blue, a "runner" or carrier of explosives. Then comes a man in light blue, who belongs to a smokeless-powder factory. All the girls are in dark blue. The different colors are used so that a superintendent at any distance can always tell if a man is on his own ground and attending to his own work. A few weeks since, a cartridge lassie in dark blue said to a man in scarlet, "Gi'e us a kiss," and he promptly "gi'ed" her one. This unlawful combination of colors caught the eye of an overseer hundreds of yards away, and the pair were instantly removed from the works and the pay-roll. Kissing and skylarking are absolutely prohibited during working hours, but on Saturdays and Sundays the workers make full amends. If reports are to be believed, the workers are more than usually romantic in their tendencies, the alleged cause being the constant breathing of nitroglycerin; and inquiring Pickwicks have taken many notes thereupon, in which the statistics of marriage and population are not entirely neglected.

Having passed the searcher, you mount the "hill," an artificial one, built of sand, and perhaps sixty feet high. On the top of it are two "nitrating-houses." They are of thin clapboards painted white, and are about twenty feet square. These houses are always placed on the tops of "hills," in order that the nitroglycerin, passing from process to process, may flow by its own weight downward. It is not exactly the kind of liquid that one wants to pump. At the door of the house you are confronted by two pairs of yawning rubber shoes. Large shoes of rubber, in-