He took me up a wet and rickety stair to a great light room, furnished with no visible thing but rude, manger-like receptacles running all round its sides; and up to these mangers, like so many mares haltered to the rack, stood rows of girls. Before each was vertically thrust up a long, glittering scythe, immovably fixed at bottom to the manger-edge. The curve of the scythe, and its having no snath to it, made it look exactly like a sword. To and fro, across the sharp edge, the girls forever dragged long strips of rags, washed white, picked from baskets at one side; thus ripping asunder every seam, and converting the tatters almost into lint. The air swam with the fine, poisonous particles, which from all sides darted, subtilely, as motes in sunbeams, into the lungs.
"This is the rag-room," coughed the boy.
"You find it rather stifling here," coughed I, in answer; "but the girls don't cough."
"Oh, they are used to it."
"Where do you get such hosts of rags?" picking up a handful from the basket.
"Some from the country round about; some from far over sea—Leghorn and London."
"'Tis not unlikely, then," murmured I, "that among these heaps of rags there may be some old shorts, gathered from the dormitories of the Paradise of Bachelors. But the buttons are all dropped off. Pray, my lad, do you ever find any bachelor's buttons hereabouts?"
"None grow in this part of the country. The Devil's Dungeon is no place for flowers."
"Oh! you mean the flowers so called—the Bachelor's Buttons?"
