ere graduated qualified to teach a district school. It
is said, that formerly, when the factory girls were all American, five
hundred could have been found at any time in the Lowell mills competent
to teach school. What a contrast these girls were in health, beauty and
intelligence to the pale, pinched faces and bedraggled dresses now seen
hurrying to the Fall River and Manchester mills. The mill girls of 1840
were self-respecting, neat in their dress, religious, readers of good
books, members of all kinds of clubs for study, and many of them could
write excellent English. The _Lowell Offering+, a magazine conducted by
factory girls at the period I have mentioned, now seems very remarkable;
not so much perhaps for its contributions, as that it should have
existed at all. Yet the writing in the _Operatives' Magazine+ and the
_Lowell Offering+ was as good as that now appearing in periodicals, in
some respects superior, being the free, unpaid and spontaneous
utterances of the human heart. It is mentioned with praise in Emerson's
_Dial+. One of our sweetest New England poets, Lucy Larcom, began her
career as a writer in them. I write that name where I can see from my
window a mountain named in her honor. Although her childhood was widely
different from mine in outward circumstances, I find in her
autobiography something of her inward experiences that reminds me of my
own.

All the old-time life of farm and factory is gone. It is refreshing to
know a single remnant of it left anywhere; and I was never more
surprised and delighted than to find in Florence, Massachusetts, a few
years ago, a large class of silk mill girls reading and studying Chaucer
under the direction of a farmer's wife of the same place. Bellingham
mill, may you continue to be filled with goodly trees until you can
assemble a class in Chaucer!

Near this ruined mill stands a row of tenement houses fast falling to
pieces and one large house where some of the operatives were boarded. In
the neighboring hamlet nearly every house is standing that was there
fifty years ago, and there are no new ones. There was an ancient law of
Solon that houses in the country should be placed a bowshot apart, and
this regulation seems to have been observed in Bellingham. You could see
their lights in the evening, hear the dogs bark and the cock crow at
dawn.

Over the Green Store is a hall where formerly Adin Ballou used to preach
his various gospels of Universalism, temperan