“If you have a husband, why don’t you go to him and let him care for you?”

She was silent, turning her wedding-ringless hand over and over on her lap:  the flies came buzzing in around us, and in the near distance Excelsior buzzed, the loudest, most insistent creature on this part of the earth.

“Seems like a woman ought to help a man—­some,” she murmured.  Downstairs Mrs. Jones sums her up in a few words.

“She-all suttinly ain’t no ’Mrs’ in the world!  Calls herself ’White.’” (The intonation is not to be mistaken.) “Pore thing’s dyin’—­knows it, tew!  Come hyar to die, I reckon.  She’ll die right up thar in that baed, tew.  Doctor don’t come no mo’.  Know she cayn’t pay him nothin’.  You-all come hyar to grandmaw, Letty!”

The child around whom the threads of existence are weaving fabric more intricate than any woof or warp of the great mills goes confidingly to the old woman, who lifts her tenderly into her arms.  With every word she speaks this aged creature draws her own picture.  To these types no pen save Tolstoi’s could do justice.  Mine can do no more than display them by faithfully transcribing their simple dialect-speech.

“I am sixty-four years old, an’ played out.  Worked too hyard.  Worked every day since I was a child, and when I wasn’t workin’ had the fevar.  Come from the hills las’ month.  When his wife dyde, the son he come an’ fetched me cross the river to help him.”

How has she lived so long and so well, with life “so hyard on her”?

“I loved my husban’, yes, ma’am, I regularly loved him; reckon no woman didn’t ever love a man mo’, and he loved me, tew, jest ez much.  Seems tho’ God couldn’t bayr to see us-all so happy—­couldn’t las’; he dyde.”

Mrs. Jones’ figure is a case of bones covered with a brown substance—­you could scarcely call it skin; a weather-beaten, tanned hide; nothing more.  This human statue, ever responsive to the eternal moulding, year after year has been worked upon by the titan instrument, Labour:  struggle, disease, want.  But this hill woman has known love.  It has transfigured her, illumined her.  This poor deformed body is a torch only for an immortal flame.  I know now why it seems good to be near her, why her eyes are inspired....  I rise to leave her and she comes forward to me, puts out her hand first, then puts both thin, old arms about me and kisses me.

In speaking of the settlement, it borders on the humourous to use the word sanitation.  In the mill district, as far as my observation reached, there is none.  Refuse not too vile for the public eye is thrown into the middle of the streets in front of the houses.  The general drainage is performed by emptying pans and basins and receptacles into the backyards, so that as one stands at the back steps of one’s own door one breathes and respires the filth of half a dozen shanties.  Decaying vegetables, rags, dirt of all kinds are the flowers of these people, the decorations of their miserable garden patches.  To walk through Granton (which the prospectus tells us is well drained) is to evoke nausea; to inhabit Granton is an ordeal which even necessity cannot rob of its severity.