d the
Superintendent was busy issuing orders on the store, or striking a
balance for the Secretary and Treasurer to pay in silver.

They stood around tired, wretched, lint- and dust-covered, but
expectant. Few were there compared with the number employed; for the
wages of the minors went to their parents, and as minors included
girls under eighteen and boys under twenty-one, their parents were
there to receive their wages for them.

These children belonged to them as mercilessly as if they had been
slaves, and despite the ties of blood, no master ever more
relentlessly collected and appropriated the wages of his slaves than
did the parents the pitiful wages of their children.

There are two great whippers-in in the child slavery of the
South--the mills which employ the children and the parents who permit
it--encourage it. Of these two the parents are often the worse, for,
since the late enactment of child labor laws, they do not hesitate to
stultify themselves by false affidavits as to the child's real age.

Kingsley had often noticed how promptly and even proudly the girls,
after reaching eighteen, and the boys twenty-one, had told him
hereafter to place their wages to their own credit, and not to the
parent's. They seemed to take a new lease on life. Decrepit,
drawn-faced, hump-shouldered and dried up before their time, the few
who reached the age when the law made them their own masters, looked
not like men and women who stand on the threshold of life, but rather
like over-worked middle-aged beings of another period.

Yet that day their faces put on a brighter look.

They stood around the office desk, awaiting their turn. The big
engine had ceased to throb and the shuttles to clatter and whirl. The
mill was so quiet that those who had, year in and year out, listened
to its clatter and hum, seemed to think some overhanging calamity was
about to drop out of the sky of terrible calm.

"Janette Smith," called out Kingsley.

She came forward, a bony, stoop-shouldered woman of thirty-five years
who had been a spooler since she was fifteen.

"Seventy-seven hours for the week"--he went on mechanically, studying
the time book, "making six dollars and sixteen cents. Rent deducted
two dollars. Wood thirty-five cents. Due commissary for goods
furnished--here, Mr. Kidd," he said to the book-keeper, "let me see
Miss Smith's account." It was shoved to him across the desk. Kingsley
elevated his glasses. Then he adjusted t