{"id":"01KG6GMNQWGPV6Q81BEPF2FS79","cid":"bafkreihgl2xovrrngsuig4sax7it6o2o7zr42m26pfniyozhm4ie66q34y","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":7953,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T03:55:03.883Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 6","source_file":"01KG6FXSCNX5F3D880P3YP3PKR","start_line":7882,"text":"‘None grow in this part of the country. The Devil’s Dungeon is no place\r\nfor flowers.’\r\n\r\n‘Oh! you mean the _flowers_ so called--the Bachelor’s Buttons?’\r\n\r\n‘And was not that what you asked about? Or did you mean the gold\r\nbosom-buttons of our boss, Old Bach, as our whispering girls all call\r\nhim?’\r\n\r\n‘The man, then, I saw below is a bachelor, is he?’\r\n\r\n‘Oh yes, he’s a Bach.’\r\n\r\n‘The edges of those swords, they are turned outward from the girls, if I\r\nsee right; but their rags and fingers fly so, I cannot distinctly see.’\r\n\r\n‘Turned outward.’\r\n\r\nYes, murmured I to myself; I see it now; turned outward; and each\r\nerected sword is so borne, edge outward, before each girl. If my reading\r\nfails me not, just so, of old, condemned state-prisoners went from the\r\nhall of judgment to their doom: an officer before, bearing a sword, its\r\nedge turned outward, in significance of their fatal sentence. So,\r\nthrough consumptive pallors of this blank, raggy life, go these white\r\ngirls to death.\r\n\r\n‘Those scythes look very sharp,’ again turning toward the boy.\r\n\r\n‘Yes; they have to keep them so. Look!’\r\n\r\nThat moment two of the girls, dropping their rags, plied each a\r\nwhetstone up and down the sword-blade. My unaccustomed blood curdled at\r\nthe sharp shriek of the tormented steel.\r\n\r\nTheir own executioners; themselves whetting the very swords that slay\r\nthem, meditated I.\r\n\r\n‘What makes those girls so sheet-white, my lad?’\r\n\r\n‘Why’--with a roguish twinkle, pure ignorant drollery, not-knowing\r\nheartlessness--‘I suppose the handling of such white bits of sheets all\r\nthe time makes them so sheety.’\r\n\r\n‘Let us leave the rag-room now, my lad.’\r\n\r\nMore tragical and more inscrutably mysterious than any mystic sight,\r\nhuman or machine, throughout the factory, was the strange innocence of\r\ncruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy.\r\n\r\n‘And now,’ said he, cheerily, ‘I suppose you want to see our great\r\nmachine, which cost us twelve thousand dollars only last autumn. That’s\r\nthe machine that makes the paper, too. This way, sir.’\r\n\r\nFollowing him, I crossed a large, bespattered place, with two great\r\nround vats in it, full of a white, wet, woolly-looking stuff, not unlike\r\nthe albuminous part of an egg, soft-boiled.\r\n\r\n‘There,’ said Cupid, tapping the vats carelessly, ‘these are the first\r\nbeginnings of the paper; this white pulp you see. Look how it swims\r\nbubbling round and round, moved by the paddle here. From hence it pours\r\nfrom both vats into that one common channel yonder; and so goes, mixed\r\nup and leisurely, to the great machine. And now for that.’\r\n\r\nHe led me into a room, stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal\r\nheat, as if here, true enough, were being finally developed the\r\ngerminous particles lately seen.\r\n\r\nBefore me, rolled out like some long Eastern manuscript, lay stretched\r\none continuous length of iron framework--multitudinous and mystical,\r\nwith all sorts of rollers, wheels, and cylinders, in slowly-measured and\r\nunceasing motion.\r\n\r","title":"Chunk 6"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG6GKYHXFMHC1JHVXJAQ6BXT","peer_type":"section","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG6FXSCNX5F3D880P3YP3PKR","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG2T49K0H5GDRB0G4YDTPG8H","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG6GMN3QXNSWB0RMK98YA9J7","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"prev"},{"peer":"01KG6GMNQWB15R8ZST0RX6P5MG","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T03:55:07.388Z","ts":"2026-01-30T03:55:19.050Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}