e
first cottages to the right a wholesome sight--the single wholesome
sight I see during my experience--meets my eye. Human kindness has
transformed one of the houses into a kindergarten--"Kindergarten" is
over the door. A pretty Southern girl, a lady, stands surrounded by her
little flock. The handful of half a dozen emancipated children who are
not in the mills is refreshing to see. There are very few; the
kindergarten flags for lack of little scholars.

I accost her. "Can you tell me any decent place to board?" She is sorry,
regards me kindly with the expression I have grown to know--the look the
eyes adopt when a person of one class addresses her sister in a lower
range.

"I am a stranger come out to work in the mills."

But the young lady takes little interest in me. Children are her care.
They surround her, clinging, laughing, calling--little birds fed so
gently by the womanly hand. She turns from the working-woman to them,
but not before indicating a shanty opposite:

"Mrs. Green lives there in that four-room cottage. She is a good woman."

Through the door's crack I interview Mrs. Green, a pallid, sickly
creature, gowned, as are most of the women, in a calico garment made all
in one piece. She permits me to enter the room which forms (as do all
the front rooms in a mill cottage) bedroom and general living-room.

Here is confusion incarnate--and filthy disorder. The tumbled, dirty bed
fills up one-half the room. In it is a little child, shaking with
chills. On the bare floor are bits of food, old vegetables, rags, dirty
utensils of all sorts of domestic description. The house has a sickening
odour. The woman tells me she is too ill to keep tidy--too ill to keep
boarders. We do not strike a bargain. "I am only here four months," she
said. "Sick ever since I come, and my little girl has fevernaygu."

I wander forth and a child directs me to a six-room cottage, "a real
bo'din'-house." I attack it and thus discover the dwelling where I make
my home in Excelsior.

From the front room of this dwelling a kitchen opens. Within its shadow
I see a Negro washing dishes. A tall woman, taller than most men,
angular, white-haired, her face seared by toil and stricken with age,
greets me: she is the landlady. At her skirts, catching them and staring
at a stranger, wanders a very young child--a blue-eyed, clean little
being; a great relief, in point of fact, to the general filth hitherto
presented me. The room beyond me