prices they paid us, he forbade my mother ever going to them again. He
said their whole business was to grow rich by defrauding of their just
dues the poor women who were thus competing with each other for work,
and that we should do no more for any of them, until we could find an
honest man and a gentleman to deal with.

But my father, always busy in his garden or in that of some wealthy
neighbor, knew nothing even of the little outside world into which we
had penetrated. His generous, unsuspecting nature thus led him to feel
sure that the honest and the gentlemanly were to be found in abundance;
but he overlooked the fact that it was only his quiet wife upon whom was
devolved the task of discovering them, as well as that her explorations
had never yet been rewarded with success.

Notwithstanding these discouragements, my mother was firmly of opinion
that the needle was a woman's only sure dependence against all the
vicissitudes of life. She believed, in a general way, that a good
needlewoman would never come to want. The idea of diversifying
employment for the sex had never crossed her mind; the vocation of woman
was to sew. All must not only do it, but they must depend on it. She
considered it of little use to think of anything beyond the needle. She
could not see, that, if all the women of the country did the same thing,
there must inevitably be more laborers than could find employment,--that
the competition would be so great among them as to depress prices to a
point so low that many women could not live on them,--and that those who
did would drag out only a miserable existence.

Though a woman of excellent sense, with a tolerable education, and fond
of all the reading she could find time to do, still she continued to
plead for this supremacy of the needle, even after her humiliating
experience at the slop-shops. She was the most industrious sewer I have
ever known,--and not only industrious, but neat, conscientious, and
rapid. Machines, with iron frames and wheels, had not then been
invented; but since they have, I have never seen a better one than my
mother. Her frame, if not of iron, seemed quite as indestructible, even
if it did turn out fewer stitches. Times without number has she sat up
till midnight, plying her needle by the dull light of a common candle:
for there was no gas in our suburban district. While we children were
sound asleep, there she sat, not from necessity, but from pure love of
work. Yet sh