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Her Bertie, who was every bit as good as the city young ladies, her cousins, was not to go to an empty house and be nursed with a lot of common mill-girls. If her mother couldn't take care of her, she should like to know who could which would have been unanswerable if Mrs. Sanderson had known how to nurse anybody a thing of which she was profoundly ignorant.
They were used to singing, poor things, at their looms mill-girls always are and their young souls took courage from the familiar sound of one another's voices. They sang the hymns and songs which they had learned in the schools and churches.
The paintresses, however, have some slight advantage over the mill-girls in the outward reticences of demeanour, due no doubt to the fact that their ancient craft demands a higher skill, and is pursued under more humane and tranquil conditions. Mary Beechinor worked in the 'band-and-line' department of the painting-shop at Price's.
A lantern, overturned in the hands of a man who was groping to save an imprisoned life, had flashed to the cotton, or the wool, or the oil with which the ruins were saturated. One of the historic conflagrations of New England resulted. "With blanching cheeks we listened to the whispers that told us how the mill-girls, caught in the ruins beyond hope of escape, began to sing.
The mill-girls standing on the Ancoats pavements; the drunken lurryman tottering out from the public-house to his lurry under the biting sleet of February; the ragged barefoot boys and girls swarming and festering in the slums; the young men struggling all about him for subsistence and success these for the first time became realities to him, entered into that pondering of 'whence and whither' to which he had been always destined, and whereon he was now consciously started.
"She was one of your father's mill-girls when you were little more than a boy," the colonel proceeded, "and you were rather in love with her, and one Easter you went away together to Blackpool. Do you remember?" Still Crotin did not speak.
One of the historic conflagrations of New England resulted. With blanching cheeks we listened to the whispers that told us how the mill-girls, caught in the ruins beyond hope of escape, began to sing. They were used to singing, poor things, at their looms mill-girls always are and their young souls took courage from the familiar sound of one another's voices.
Concerning the Lowell mill-hands of to-day, I prefer, before my own observations, to quote from an article entitled "Early Factory Labor in New England," written by a lady, herself one of the early mill-girls, and published in the "Massachusetts Labor Bureau Keport for 1883."
The first item on my list "Board and room, good neighborhood, $3.00" took me south across Fourteenth Street, choked and congested with the morning traffic. The pavements were filled with hurrying crowds factory-hands, mill-girls, mechanics the vanguard of the great labor army. I hunted for Mrs. McGinniss's residence in a street which pays little attention to the formality of numbers.
She says: "Last winter, I was invited to speak to a company of the Lowell mill-girls, and tell them something of my early life as a member of their guild. When my address was over, some of them gathered round and asked me questions. In turn, I questioned them about their work, hours of labor, wages, and means of improvement.
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