In my present condition I do not hark back to civilized wants, but repeatedly my mind travels toward the country places I have seen in the fields and forests.  If I had a holiday I would spend it seeing not what man but what God has made.  These are the things to be remembered in addressing or trying to amuse or instruct girls who are no more prepared than I felt myself to be for any preconceived ideal of art or ethics.  The omnipresence of dirt and ugliness, of machines and “stock,” leave the mind in a state of lassitude which should be roused by something natural.  As an initial remedy for the ills I voluntarily assumed I would propose amusement.  Of all the people who spoke to us that Saturday, we liked best the one who made us laugh.  It was a relief to hear something funny.  In working as an outsider in a factory girls’ club I had always held that nothing was so important as to give the poor something beautiful to look at and think about—­a photograph or copy of some chef d’oeuvre, an objet d’art, lessons in literature and art which would uplift their souls from the dreariness of their surroundings.  Three weeks as a factory girl had changed my beliefs.  If the young society women who sacrifice one evening every week to talk to the poor in the slums about Shakespeare and Italian art would instead offer diversion first—­a play, a farce, a humourous recitation—­they would make much more rapid progress in winning the confidence of those whom they want to help.  The working woman who has had a good laugh is more ready to tell what she needs and feels and fears than the woman who has been forced to listen silently to an abstract lesson.  In society when we wish to make friends with people we begin by entertaining them.  It should be the same way with the poor.  Next to amusement as a means of giving temporary relief and bringing about relations which will be helpful to all, I put instruction, in the form of narrative, about the people of other countries, our fellow man, how he lives and works; and, third, under this same head, primitive lessons about animals and plants, the industries of the bees, the habits of ants, the natural phenomena which require no reasoning power to understand and which open the thoughts upon a delightful unknown vista.

My first experience is drawing to its close.  I have surmounted the discomforts of insufficient food, of dirt, a bed without sheets, the strain of hard manual labour.  I have confined my observations to life and conditions in the factory.  Owing, as I have before explained, to the absorption of factory life into city life in a place as large as Pittsburg, it seemed to me more profitable to centre my attention on the girl within the factory, leaving for a small town the study of her in her family and social life.  I have pointed out as they appeared to me woman’s relative force as a worker and its effects upon her economic advancement.  I have touched upon two cases which illustrate her relative dependence on