I ran such risk taking pictures that I relinquished the task, and it was only the last day at the mill, while still in my working clothes with a camera concealed in my pocket, that I contrived to get a picture or two.  I ventured to ask two little boys who swept the mill to stand for their pictures.

“I don’t kyar to,” the older one said.  I explained that it would not hurt them, as I thought he was afraid; but his little companion vouchsafed:  “We-all ain’t got no nickel.”  When they understood it was a free picture they were as delighted as possible and posed with alacrity, making touching apologies for their greasy, dirty condition.

When I asked one of them if he was ever clean, he said:  “On Sunday I wash my hands.”

It was noon, on the day I chose to leave ——­, turning my back on the mill that had allured me to its doors and labour.  In South Carolina early April is torrid, flies and mosquitoes are rampant.  What must this settlement be in midsummer heat?  There is no colour in the Southern scene; the clothes of the mill-hands, the houses, the soil are of one tone—­and, more strange, there is not one line of red, one dash of life, in the faces of the hundreds of women and children that pass me on their way back to work.

Under the existing circumstances they have no outlook, these people, no hope; their appearance expresses accurately the changeless routine of an existence devoted to eternal ignorance, eternal toil.

From their short half-hour of mid-noon rest, the whistle, piercing, inanimate call, has dared to command the slavish obedience of animate and intelligent beings.  I pause by the trestle over which rumble the cars, heavily laden with the cotton cloth whose perfection has made this Southern mill justly famous.

The file of humanity that passes me I shall never forget!  The Blank Mill claims 1,500 of these labourers; at least 200 are children.  The little things run and keep step with the older men and women; their shaggy, frowzled heads are bent, their hands protrude pitifully from their sleeves; they are barefooted, bareheaded.  With these little figures the elements wanton; they can never know the fullness of summer or the proper maturity of autumn.  Suns have burned them, rains have fallen upon them, as unprotected through storms they go to their work.  The winter winds have penetrated the tatters with blades like knives; gray and dusty and earth-coloured the line passes.  These are children?  No, they are wraiths of childhood—­they are effigies of youth!  What can Hope work in this down-trodden soil for any future harvest?  They can curse and swear; they chew tobacco and take snuff.  When they speak at all their voices are feeble; ears long dulled by the thunder of the mill are no longer keen to sound; their speech is low and scarcely audible.  Over sallow cheeks where the skin is tightly drawn their eyes regard you suspiciously, malignantly even, never with the frank look of childhood.  As the long afternoon goes by in its hours of leisure for us fatigue settles like a blight over their features, their expressions darken to elfish strangeness, whilst sullen lines, never to be eradicated, mark the distinctive visages of these children of labour.