bour, although whipped by invisible scourge of Need. Without this
incentive and spur, think you it would pursue a direction toward
_thirteen hours of toil_, shut from air and sunlight and day, taking in
its rank the women, the young girl and the little child?

The tone of the garments is somber and gray, blending with the gray of
the dawn; or red, blending with the earth stains of the peculiar
Southern soil; or claylike and pale yellow. Many of the faces are
pallid, some are tense, most of them are indifferent, dulled by toil and
yet not all unintelligent. Those who are familiar with the healthy type
of the decent workmen of the West and East must draw their distinctions
as they consider this peculiar, unfamiliar class. The Southern
mill-hand's face is unique--a fearful type, whose perusal is not
pleasant or cheerful to the character-reader, to the lover of humanity
or to the prophet of the future. Thus they defile: men with felt hats
drawn over their brows; women, sunbonneted or hatless; children
barefoot, bareheaded, ragged, unwashed. Unwashed these labourers have
gone to bed; unwashed they have arisen. To their garments cling the bits
of cotton, the threads of cotton, the strands of roping, badges of
their trade, brand of their especial toil. As they pass over the red
clay, over the pale yellow sand, the earth seems to claim them as part
of her unchanging phase; cursed by the mandate primeval--"by the sweat
of thy brow"--Earth-Born!

In the early morning the giant mill swallows its victims, engorges
itself with entering humanity; then it grows active, stirring its
ponderous might to life, movement and sound. Hear it roar, shudder,
shattering the stillness for half a mile! It is full now of flesh and
blood, of human life and brain and fiber: it is content! Triumphantly
during the long, long hours it devours the tithe of body and soul.

Behind lies the deserted, accursed village, destitute of life during the
hours of day, condemned to the care of a few women, the old, the
bedridden and the sick--of which last there are plenty.

Mighty Mills--pride of the architect and the commercial magnate; charnel
houses, devastators, destructors of homes and all that mankind calls
hallowed; breeders of strife, of strike, of immorality, of sedition and
riot--buildings tremendous--you give your immutable faces,
myriads-windowed, to the dust-heaps, to the wind-swept plains of sand.
When South Carolina shall have taken from you (as i