<p>Lyddie: Chapter 9 excerpt, “The Weaving Room”, p. 62-63</p><p>Creation! What a noise! Clatter and clack, great shuddering moans, groans, creaks, and rattles. The shrieks and whistles of huge leather belts on wheels. And when her brain cleared enough, Lyddie saw through the murky air row upon row of machines, eerily like the old hand loom in Quaker Steven’s house, but as unlike as a nightmare, for these creatures had come to life. They seemed moved by eyes alone— the eyes of neat, vigilant young women—needing only the occasional, swift intervention of a human hand to keep them clattering. From the overarching metal frame crowning each machine, wooden harnesses, carrying hundreds of warp threads drawn from a massive beam at the back of each loom, clanked up and down. Shuttles holding the weft thread hurtled themselves like beasts of prey through the tall forests of warp threads, and beaters slammed the threads tightly into place. With alarming speed, inches of finished cloth rolled up on the beams at the front of the looms. The girls didn’t seem afraid or even amazed. As he walked by with the overseer, girls glanced up. A few smiled, some stared. No one seemed to mind the deafening din. How could they stand it? She had thought a single stagecoach struggling to hold back the horses on a downhill run was unbearable noisy. A single stagecoach! A factory was a hundred stagecoaches all inside one’s skull, banging their wheels against the bone. Her impulse was to turn and run for the door, down the rickety stairs, through the yard and counting room, across the narrow bridge, past the row of boardinghouses, down the street—out of the hellish city and back, back, back, to the green hills and quiet pastures. </p>