The department in which the pipe tobacco is packed in tins is a very
different sort of place; here white labor is employed: a great many
girls seated side by side at benches working with great digital
dexterity: measuring out the tobacco, folding wax paper cartons, filling
them, and slipping them into the narrow tins, all at a rate of speed so
great as to defy the sight, giving a sense of fingers flickering above
the bench with a strange, almost supernatural sureness, like the fingers
of a magician who makes things disappear before your eyes; or like the
pictures in which post-impressionist and cubist painters attempt to
express motion.
"May I speak to one of them?" I asked the superintendent.
"Sure," said he.
I went up to a young woman who was working, if anything, more rapidly
than the other girls at the same bench.
"Can you think, while you are doing this?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied, without looking up, while her fingers flashed on
ceaselessly.
"About other things?"
"Certainly."
"How many cans do you fill in a day?"
"About thirty-four to thirty-five hundred on the average."
"May I ask your name?" She gave it.
I took up one of the small identification slips which she put into each
package, and wrote her name upon the back of it. The number on the
slip--for the purpose of identifying the girl who packed the tin--was
220.
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