the floor. Others "dip," going about with the
long sticks in their mouths. The air of the room is white with cotton,
although the spool-room is perhaps the freest. These little particles
are breathed into the nose, drawn into the lungs. Lung disease and
pneumonia--consumption--are the constant, never-absent scourge of the
mill village. The girls expectorate to such an extent that the floor is
nauseous with it; the little girls practise spitting and are adepts at
it.

Over there is a woman of sixty, spooling; behind the next side is a
child, not younger than eight, possibly, but so small that she has to
stand on a box to reach her side. Only the very young girls show any
trace of buoyancy; the older ones have accepted with more or less
complaint the limitation of their horizons. They are drawn from the hill
district with traditions no better than the loneliness, desertion and
inexperience of the fever-stricken mountains back of them. They are
illiterate, degraded; the mill has been their widest experience; and all
their tutelage is the intercourse of girl to girl during the day and in
the evenings the few moments before they go to bed in the mill-houses,
where they either live at home with parents and brothers all working
like themselves, or else they are fugitive lodgers in a boarding-house
or a hotel, where their morals are in jeopardy constantly. As soon as a
girl passes the age, let us say of seventeen or eighteen, there is no
hesitation in her reply when you ask her: "Do you like the mills?"
Without exception the answer is, "I _hate them_."

Absorbed with the novelty of learning my trade, the time goes swiftly.
Yet even the interest and excitement does not prevent fatigue, and from
12:45 to 6:45 seems interminable! Even when the whistle blows we are not
all free--Excelsior is behindhand with her production, and those whom
extra pay can beguile stay on. Maggie, my little teacher, walks with me
toward our divided destinations, her quasi-home and mine.

Neither in the mill nor the shoe-shops did I take precaution to change
my way of speaking--and not once had it been commented upon. To-day
Maggie says to me:

"I reckon you-all is 'Piscopal?"

"Why?"

"Why, you-all _talks_ 'Piscopal."

So much for a tribute to the culture of the church.

* * * * *

At Jones' supper is ready, spread on a bare board running the length of
the room--a bare board supported by saw-horses; the seats ar