I asked him how he liked city life.

“Give me a farm every time,” was his answer.  “Once you’ve seen a town you know it all.  It’s the same over and over again.  But the country’s changing every day in the year.  It’s a terrible thing, being sick,” he went on.  “It seems sometimes as though the pain would tear me to pieces when I walk across the floor.  I wasn’t no good on the farm any more, so my wife took a notion we better come in town and take boarders.”

Thus it was with this happily balanced couple; as his side grew heavier she took on more ballast and swung even with him.  She had the quick adaptability common to American women.  During the years of farm life religious meetings and a few neighbours had kept her in touch with the outside world.  The church and the kitchen were what she had on the farm; the church and the kitchen were what she had in town; family life supplemented by boarders, a social existence kept alive by a few faithful neighbours.  She had retained her activity and sympathy because she was intelligent, because she lived with the young.  The man could not make himself one of another generation, so he lived alone.  He had lost his companions, the “cow kind and the sheep kind”; he had lost control over the earth that belonged to him; he was disused; he suffered; he pined.  But as they sat together side by side at table, his look toward her was one of trust and comfort.  His glance traveled back over a long vista of years seen to them as their eyes met, invisible to those about—­years that had glorified confidence in this life as it passed and transfigured it into the promise of another life to come.

* * * * *

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV

MAKING CLOTHING IN CHICAGO

On arriving in Chicago I addressed myself to the ladies of Hull House, asking for a tenement family who would take a factory girl to board.  I intended starting out without money to see at least how far I could go before putting my hand into the depths where an emergency fund was pinned in a black silk bag.

It was the first day of May.  A hot wind blew eddies of dust up and down the electric car tracks; the streets were alive with children; a group swarmed in front of each doorstep, too large to fit into the house behind it.  Down the long, regular avenues that stretched right and left there was a broken line of tenements topped by telegraph wires and bathed in a soft cloud of black soot falling from a chimney in the neighbourhood.  The sidewalks were a patchwork of dirt, broken paving-stones and wooden boards.  The sunshine was hot and gloomy.  There were no names on the corner lamps and the house numbers were dull and needed repainting.  It was already late in the afternoon:  I had but an hour or two before dark to find a lodging.  The miserable, overcrowded tenement houses repelled me, yet I dreaded that there should not be room among them for one more bread-winner to lodge.  I hailed a cluster of children in the gutter: