the mistresses which shall make their inmates most comfortable.  We visited one of the hoarding houses, and were highly pleased with its arrangement.  A considerable number of the factory girls are farmers’ daughters, and come hither from Vermont, New Hampshire, and other distant States, to work for two, three, or four years, when they return to their native hills, dowered with a little capital of their own earnings.  The factory operatives at Lowell form a community that commands the respect of the neighborhood, and of all under whose observation they come.  No female of an immoral character could remain a week in any of the mills.  The superintendent of the Boott Corporation informed me, that, during the five and a half years of his superintendence of that factory, employing about nine hundred and fifty young women, he had known of but one case of an illegitimate birth—­and the mother was an Irish “immigrant.”  Any male or female employed, who was known to be in a state of inebriety, would be at once dismissed.

At the suggestion of the benevolent and intelligent superintendent of the Boott Company, we waited to see the people turn out to dinner, at half-past twelve o’clock.  We stood in a position where many hundreds passed under our review, whose dress, and quiet and orderly demeanor would have done credit to any congregation breaking up from their place of worship.  One of the gentlemen with me, who is from a slave State, where all labor is considered degrading, remarked, with emotion, “What would I give if, (naming a near relative in the slave States,) could witness this only for a quarter of an hour!” We dined with one of our abolition friends at Lowell, who informed us that many hundreds of the factory girls were members of the Anti-Slavery Society; and that, although activity in this cause has been pretty much suspended by the division in the ranks of its friends, yet there is no diminution of good feeling on the subject.  The following extracts, from a pamphlet published by a respectable citizen of Lowell, will further illustrate the moral statistics of the place, which, I believe, can be paralleled by no other manufacturing town in the world.  The work is dated July, 1839:—­

“There are now in the city fourteen regularly organized religious societies, besides one or two others quite recently established.  Ten of these societies constitute a Sabbath School Union.  Their third annual report was made on the fourth of the present month, and it has been published within a few days.  I derive from it the following facts.  The number of scholars connected with the ten schools at the time of making the report, was four thousand nine hundred and thirty-six, and the number of teachers was four hundred and thirty-three, making an aggregate of five thousand three hundred and sixty-nine.  The number who joined the schools during the year, was three thousand seven hundred and seventy, the number who left was three thousand one hundred