mutual work is to link us
forever with one another in the Infinite Life.

The girls who toiled together at Lowell were clearing away a few weeds
from the overgrown track of independent labor for other women. They
practically said, by numbering themselves among factory girls, that in
our country no real odium could be attached to any honest toil that any
self-respecting woman might undertake.

I regard it as one of the privileges of my youth that I was permitted
to grow up among those active, interesting girls, whose lives were not
mere echoes of other lives, but had principle and purpose distinctly
their own. Their vigor of character was a natural development. The New
Hampshire girls who came to Lowell were descendants of the sturdy
backwoodsmen who settled that State scarcely a hundred years before.
Their grandmothers had suffered the hardships of frontier life, had
known the horrors of savage warfare when the beautiful valleys of the
Connecticut and the Merrimack were threaded with Indian trails from
Canada to the white settlements. Those young women did justice to their
inheritance. They were earnest and capable; ready to undertake anything
that was worth doing. My dreamy, indolent nature was shamed into
activity among them. They gave me a larger, firmer ideal of womanhood.

Often during the many summers and autumns that of late years I have
spent among the New Hampshire hills, sometimes far up the
mountainsides, where I could listen to the first song of the little
brooks setting out on their journey to join the very river that flowed
at my feet when I was a working girl on its banks,--the Merrimack,--I
have felt as if I could also hear the early music of my workmates'
lives, those who were born among these glorious summits. Pure, strong,
crystalline natures, carrying down with them the light of blue skies
and the freshness of free winds to their place of toil, broadening and
strengthening as they went on, who can tell how they have refreshed the
world, how beautifully they have blended their being with the great
ocean of results? A brook's life is like the life of a maiden. The
rivers receive their strength from the rock-born hills, from the
unfailing purity of the mountain-streams.

A girl's place in the world is a very strong one: it is a pity that she
does not always see it so. It is strongest through her natural impulse
to steady herself by leaning upon the Eternal Life, the only Reality;
and her weakness c