Excerpt from Miss. Petticoats The great bell in the granite tower of old Number One mill clanged out its warning of the noontide release to the hundreds who toiled their lives away within its walls, and presently there poured forth from its gray portals and out between the smooth spaces of well-kept lawn to the iron gates a swarm of men and women, boys and girls, like angered bees from a hive. Only from this hive there came no drones, for by the grim survival of the fittest only those who could work from sunrise to sunset and from day to day, with but one gleam of blessed Sabbath light, were given place in the vast home of industry. Like bees too, these mill people of Old Chetford were excitedly buzzing about some special thing that had aroused their ire. That was clear from the broken bits of conversation that now and again rose above the monotonous humming of the majority. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.