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One bitter December morning in 1901 I left Boston for Lynn, Mass.  The route of my train ran close to marshes; frozen hard ice many feet thick covered the rocks and hillocks of earth, and on the dazzling winter scene the sun shone brilliantly.

No sooner had I taken my place in my plain attire than my former personality slipped from me as absolutely as did the garments I had discarded.  I was Bell Ballard.  People from whose contact I had hitherto pulled my skirts away became my companions as I took my place shoulder to shoulder with the crowd of breadwinners.

Lynn in winter is ugly.  The very town itself seemed numbed and blue in the intense cold well below zero.  Even the Christmas-time greens in the streets and holly in the store windows could not impart festivity to this city of workers.  The thoroughfares are trolley lined, of course, and a little beyond the town’s centre is a common, a white wooden church stamping the place New England.

Lynn is made up of factories—­great masses of ugliness, red brick, many-windowed buildings.  The General Electric has a concern in this town, but the industry is chiefly the making of shoes.  The shoe trade in our country is one of the highest paying manufactures, and in it there are more women employed than in any other trade.  Lynn’s population is 70,000; of these 10,000 work in shoe-shops.

The night must not find me homeless, houseless.  I went first to a directory and found the address of the Young Women’s Christian Association:  a room upstairs in a building on one of the principal streets.  Here two women faced me as I made my appeal, and I saw at once displayed the sentiments of kindness thenceforth to greet me throughout my first experience—­qualities of exquisite sympathy, rare hospitality and human interest.

“I am looking for work.  I want to get a room in a safe place for the night.”

I had not for a moment supposed that anything in my attire of simple decorous work-clothes could awaken pity.  Yet pity it was and nothing less in the older woman’s face.

“Work in the shops?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The simple fact that I was undoubtedly to make my own living and my own way in the hard hand-to-hand struggle in the shops aroused her sympathy.

She said earnestly:  “You must not go anywhere to sleep that you don’t know about, child.”

She wrote an address for me on a slip of paper.

“Go there; I know the woman.  If she can’t take you, why, come back here.  I’ll take you to my own house.  I won’t have you sleep in a strange town just anywheres!  You might get into trouble.”

She was not a matron; she was not even one of the staff of managers or directors.  She was only a woman who had come in to ask some question, receive some information; and thus in marvelous friendliness she turned and outstretched her hand—­I was a stranger and this was her welcome.