This preparation continues for an hour:  it takes an abnormally long time to cook abnormally bad food!  Long before five the clock of Excelsior rings and the cry of the mill is heard waking whomsoever might be lucky enough to be asleep.  Mrs. Jones calls Molly.  “Molly!” The girl murmurs and turns.  “Come, you-all git up; you take so powerful long to dress yo’self!” Long to dress!  It is difficult to see how that would be possible.  She rises reluctantly, yawning, sighing; lifts her scarcely rested body, puts on her stockings and her shoes and the dirty wrapper.  Her hair is untouched, her face unwashed, but she is ready for the day!  Mrs. White has actually fallen asleep, the small roll, her baby, curled up close to her back.

Molly’s summons is mine as well.  I am a mill-hand with her.  I rise and repeat my ablutions of the evening before.  Unhooking the tin basin, possessing myself of a bit of soap on the kitchen stairs, I wash my face and hands.  Although the water is dipped from the pail on which a scum has formed, still it is so much more cool, refreshing and stimulating than anything that has come in contact with me for hours that it is a positive pleasure.

* * * * *

THE MILL

By this time the morning has found us all, and unlovely it seems as regarded from this shanty environment.  At 4:50 Excelsior has shrieked every settler awake.  At half-past five we have breakfasted and I pass out of the house, one of the half-dozen who seek the mill from our doors.

We fall in with the slowly moving, straggling file, receiving additions from each tenement as we pass.

Beside me walks a boy of fourteen in brown earth-coloured clothes.  He is so thin that his bones threaten to pierce his vestments.  He has a slender visage of the frailness I have learned to know and distinguish:  it represents the pure American type of people known as “poor white trash,” and with whose blood has been scarcely any admixture of foreign element.  A painter would call his fine, sensitive face beautiful:  it is the face of a martyr.  His hat of brown felt slouches over bright red hair; one cuffless hand, lank and long, hangs down inert, the other sleeve falls loose; he is one-armed.  His attitude and gait express his defrauded existence.  Cotton clings to his clothes; his shoes, nearly falling off his feet, are red with clay stains.  I greet him; he is shy and surprised, but returns the salutation and keeps step with me.  He is “from the hills,” an orphan, perfectly friendless.  He boards with a lot of men; evidently their companionship has not been any solace to him, for, as he is alone this day, I see him always alone.

He works from 5:45 to 6:45, with three-quarters of an hour at noon, and has his Saturday afternoons and his Sundays free.  He is destitute of the quality we call joy and has never known comfort.  He makes fifty cents a day; he has no education, no way of getting an education; he is almost a man, crippled and condemned.  At my exclamation when he tells me the sum of his wages he looks up at me; a faint likeness to a smile comes about his thin lips:  “It keeps me in existence!” he says in a slow drawl.  He used just those words.