seven o'clock
The sun even shone -- a sun whose face seemed white and wondering . And under that rare sun all the little town , among its slag heaps and few tall chimneys , had an air of living faster . In those continuous courts and alleys , where the women worked , smoke from each little forge rose and dispersed into the wind with strange alacrity ; amongst the women , too , there was that same eagerness , for the sunshine had crept in and was making pale all those dark-raftered , sooted ceilings which covered them in , together with their immortal comrades , the small open furnaces . About their work they had been busy since seven o'clock ; their feet pressing the leather lungs which fanned the conical heaps of glowing fuel , their hands poking into the glow a thin iron rod till the end could be curved into a fiery hook ; snapping it with a mallet ; threading it with tongs on to the chain ; hammering , closing the link ; and ; without a second 's pause , thrusting the iron rod again into the glow . And while they worked they chattered , laughed sometimes , now and then sighed . They seemed of all ages and all types ; from her who looked like a peasant of Provence , broad , brown , and strong , to the weariest white consumptive wisp ; from old women of seventy , with straggling grey hair , to fifteen-year-old girls . In the cottage forges there would be but one worker , or two at most ; in the shop forges four , or even five , little glowing heaps ; four or five of the grimy , pale lung-bellows ; and never a moment without a fiery hook about to take its place on the growing chains , never a second when the thin smoke of the forges , and of those lives consuming slowly in front of them , did not escape from out of the dingy , whitewashed spaces past the dark rafters , away to freedom .