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The mill-people among whom he had worked the previous week would scarcely have recognized him as he came down to breakfast the following morning, dressed with taste and elegance. It was evident that his sisters could endure him with better grace than when clad in his coarse, working garb, redolent with the hitherto unimagined odors pertaining to well-oiled machinery.
There are few things which give a man more power over his fellows than the thoroughly English quality of daring. Perhaps this was the secret why John had as yet passed safely through the crisis which had been the destruction of so many mill-owners, namely, the introduction of a power which the mill-people were convinced would ruin hand-labour.
Many of the prominent men of the country were in the habit of giving Lyceum lectures, and the Lyceum lecture of that day was a means of education, conveying to the people the results of study and thought through the best minds. At Lowell it was more patronized by the mill-people than any mere entertainment.
Rolling and reeking decks have known him, and falling walls, and shrieks, and flames mounting skyward, and viking sagas, and drinking-songs roared from brass throats, and terrible hymns to Odin Allfather in the midwatches of Northern nights. He had called upon me shortly after his arrival, his ostensible reason being my work among his mill-people. I think he liked me, later.
Every house occupied by the mill-people was visited, and every injured person was cared for. The women on the committee visited the hospitals and for a time became nurses ministering to every want. Money and abundance of food were also contributed, and such kindness on the part of the rich the work-people had never known before.
We did not think about the mill-people; they seemed as far from us as the coal-miners of a vague West, or the down-gatherers on the crags of shores whose names we did not think it worth while to remember. One January evening, we were forced to think about the mills with curdling horror that no one living in that locality when the tragedy happened will forget.
On a morning in late March, with a sweet and fresh wind blowing, a clear sun shining, and a sky so full of soft white woolly clouds that you might fancy the sky-people had turned their fleecy flock out to graze in the deep blue pastures, Laurence Mayne and I brought John Flint downstairs and rolled him out into the glad, green garden, in the comfortable wheel-chair that the mill-people had given us for a Christmas present; my mother and Clélie followed, and our little dog Pitache marched ahead, putting on ridiculous airs of responsibility; he being a dog with a great idea of his own importance and wholly given over to the notion that nothing could go right if he were not there to superintend and oversee it.
"You want a new girl for our drawing-in machine the best paying and most profitable place in the mill off from the others in a room by herself no contact with mill-people easy job two dollars a day " "One dollar you forgit, suh one dollar's the reg'lar price, sah," interrupted the Whipper-in.
It appeared a misfortune once more, and not so much a fault of his. He was restored to this feeling in part by the respect, the distinction which he enjoyed in the little village, and which pleasantly recalled his consequence among the mill-people at Ponkwasset.
He looked as proud and pleased as a boy, in talking of the new inventions he meant to apply in cloth-weaving; and how he and his wife had agreed together to live for some years to come at little Longfield, strictly within their settled income, that all the remainder of his capital might go to the improvement of Enderley Mills and mill-people. "I shall be master of nearly a hundred, men and women.
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