Page:The food of the Gods - A Popular Account of Cocoa.djvu/109

 52 Fruit is made a speciality, an experienced buyer being employed to insure its better supply. A private dining-room is provided for the fore-women.

Returning to the dining-hall, we descend a flight of steps into the spacious dressing-rooms, with vistas of wooden screens, filled on each side with numbered hooks. Here every morning the thousands of girls not only divest themselves of their outer garments, but change their dresses for washing frocks of white holland. The material for these is provided by the firm, free for the first, and afterwards at less than cost price, and the girls are required to start work in a clean frock every Monday morning. It will be seen at once how this helps them to keep neat and respectable; their strong white washing frocks only being soiled by their work, after which they change back into their own unstained clothes, and turn out looking as great a contrast to the usually pictured type of factory girl as can be imagined. The fore-women also conform to this arrangement, but wear washing