raiment, let us be therewith content."

If I could earn enough to furnish that, and have time to study
besides,--of course we always gave away a little, however little we
had,--it seemed to me a sufficiency. At this time I was receiving two
dollars a week, besides my board. Those who were earning much more, and
were carefully "laying it up," did not appear to be any happier than I
was.

I never thought that the possession of money would make me feel rich:
it often does seem to have an opposite effect. But then, I have never
had the opportunity of knowing, by experience, how it does make one
feel. It is something to have been spared the responsibility of taking
charge of the Lord's silver and gold. Let us be thankful for what we
have not, as well as for what we have!

Freedom to live one's life truly is surely more desirable than any
earthly acquisition or possession; and at my new work I had hours of
freedom every day. I never went back again to the bondage of machinery
and a working-day thirteen hours long.

The daughter of one of our neighbors, who also went to the same church
with us, told me of a vacant place in the cloth-room, where she was,
which I gladly secured. This was a low brick building next the
counting-room, and a little apart from the mills, where the cloth was
folded, stamped, and baled for the market.

There were only half a dozen girls of us, who measured the cloth, and
kept an account of the pieces baled, and their length in yards. It
pleased me much to have something to do which required the use of pen
and ink, and I think there must be a good many scraps of verse buried
among the blank pages of those old account-books of that found their
way there during the frequent half-hours of waiting for the cloth to be
brought in from the mills.

The only machinery in the room was a hydraulic arrangement for pressing
the cloth into bales, managed by two or three men, one of whom was
quite a poet, and a fine singer also. His hymns were frequently in
request, on public occasions. He lent me the first volume of Whittier's
poems that I ever saw. It was a small book, containing mostly
Antislavery pieces. "The Yankee Girl" was one of them, fully to
appreciate the spirit of which, it is necessary to have been a
working-girl in slave-labor times. New England Womanhood crowned
Whittier as her laureate from the day of his heroine's spirited
response to the slaveholder:--

"O, could ye have seen her--that p