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Since the time of Crompton it has been greatly improved, and the spinning-room of a modern cotton-mill contains machinery as highly perfected as any that has been invented. Spinning by machinery is the foundation of the modern textile industry.
Close beside the place where the leaves were burned, the poor old women had their spinning-room. I often went in there, and was very soon a favorite. When with these people, I found myself possessed of an eloquence which filled them with astonishment.
It was the custom among the young people of Seebach to assemble of an evening in the spinning-room, which on the occasion about to be dealt with was in the house of the richest and most distinguished family in the country. The girls spun and laughed and chatted, while the youths hung about their chairs and cracked jokes with them.
Odo's grandmother, the old Marchioness, a heavy woman who would doubtless have enjoyed her ease in a cushioned seat, was afoot all day attending to her household; for besides the dairy and the bakehouse and the stillroom where fruits were stewed and pastes prepared, there was the great spinning-room full of distaffs and looms, where the women spun and wove all the linen used in the castle and the coarse stuffs worn by its inmates; with workshops for the cobbler and tailor who clothed and shod the Marquess and his household.
In the villages round about the mountain it was the custom for the young people to meet together at each other's houses on Saturday evenings. Those who had rooms large enough, took it in turns to invite all the rest; the girls brought their spinning-wheels, and the room where they met was called the spinning-room. The girls were busy and merry at the same time.
The Merrimack has blent its music with the onward song of many a lovely soul that, clad in plain working-clothes, moved heavenward beside its waters. One of the loveliest persons I ever knew was a young girl who worked opposite to me in the spinning-room. Our eyes made us friends long before we spoke to each other.
I have very little patience with an unmarried woman no, not if she were Queen Elizabeth herself though I do know that they are sometimes found very useful in the dairy or the spinning-room. As for an old bachelor, I have never seen the spot on earth and I've lived to a great age where he wasn't an encumbrance.
An irreverent little workmate of mine in the spinning-room made a string of jingling couplets about it, like this: "Oh dear! oh dear! what shall we do In eighteen hundred and forty-two? "Oh dear! oh dear! where shall we be In eighteen hundred and forty-three? "Oh dear! oh dear! we shall be no more In eighteen hundred and forty-four,
And this is some of what they sang: Why sit ye bare in the spinning-room? Why weave ye naked at the loom? Bare and white as the moon we be, That the Earth and the drifting night may see. Now what is the worst of all your work? What curse amidst the web shall lurk? The worst of the work our hands shall win Is wrack and ruin round the kin.
This was the plan that indefinitely shaped itself in my mind as I returned to my work in the spinning-room, and which I followed out, not without many breaks and hindrances and neglects, during the next six or seven years, to learn all I could, so that I should be fit to teach or to write, as the way opened. And it turned out that fifteen or twenty of my best years were given to teaching.
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