There is not a garden within miles, not a flower, scarcely a tree.  Arid, desolate, beautyless, the pale sand of the State of South Carolina nurtures as best it can a stray tree or shrub—­no more.  At the foot of the shanties’ black line rises the cotton mill.  New, enormous, sanitary (!!).  Its capital runs into millions; its prospectuses are pompous; its pay-roll mysterious.  You will not be able to say how many of the fifteen hundred odd hands at work in this mill are adults, how many children.  In the State of South Carolina there are statistics of neither births, marriages nor deaths.  What can you expect of a mill village!

At 5:45 we have breakfasted—­the twelve of us who live in one small shanty, where we have slept, all five of us in one room, men to the right of the kitchen, women and children on the left.  To leave the pestilence of foul air, the stench of that dwelling, is blessed, even if the stroke that summons is the mill whistle.

As we troop to work in the dawn, we leave behind us the desert-like town; all day it drowses, haunted by a few figures of old age and infirmity—­but the mill is alive!  We have given up, in order to satisfy its appetite, all manner of flesh and blood, and the gentlest morsel between its merciless jaws is the little child.

So long as I am part of its food and triumph I will study the mill.

Leaving the line of flashing, whirling spools, I lean against the green box full of cotton refuse and regard the giant room.

It is a wonderful sight.  The mill itself, a model of careful, well-considered building, has every facility for the best and most advantageous manufacture of textiles.  The fine frames of the intricate “warping,” the well-placed frames of the “drawing-in” all along the window sides of the rooms; then lines upon lines of spool frames.  Great piles of stuff lie here and there in the room.  It is early—­“all the yarn ain’t come yet.”  Two children whose work has not been apportioned lie asleep against a cotton bale.  The terrible noise, the grinding, whirling, pounding, the gigantic burr renders other senses keen.  By my side works a little girl of eight.  Her brutal face, already bespeaking knowledge of things childhood should ignore, is surrounded by a forest of yellow hair.  She goes doggedly at her spools, grasping them sullenly.  She walks well on her bare, filthy feet.  Her hands and arms are no longer flesh colour, but resemble weather-roughened hide, ingrained with dirt.  Around the tangle of her hair cotton threads and bits of lint make a sort of aureole. (Her nimbus of labour, if you will!) There is nothing saint-like in that face, nor in the loose-lipped mouth, whence exudes a black stain of snuff as between her lips she turns the root she chews.

“She’s a mean girl,” my little companion says; “we-all don’t hev nothin’ to say to her.”

“Why?”

“Her maw hunts her to the mill; she don’t want to go—­no, sir—­so she’s mad most the time.”