With Excelsior as my future workshop I leave the mill to seek lodging in the mill village.

The houses built by the corporation for the hands are some five or six minutes’ walk, not more, from the palace-like structure of the mill proper.  To reach them I plod through a roadway ankle-deep in red clay dust.  The sun is bright and the air heavy, lifeless and dull; the scene before me is desolate, meager and poverty-stricken in the extreme.

The mill houses are all built exactly alike.  Painted in sickly greens and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil.  Here the architect has catered to the different families, different individual tastes in one point of view alone, regarding the number of rooms:  They are known as “four-or six-room cottages.”  In one of the first cottages to the right a wholesome sight—­the single wholesome sight I see during my experience—­meets my eye.  Human kindness has transformed one of the houses into a kindergarten—­“Kindergarten” is over the door.  A pretty Southern girl, a lady, stands surrounded by her little flock.  The handful of half a dozen emancipated children who are not in the mills is refreshing to see.  There are very few; the kindergarten flags for lack of little scholars.

I accost her.  “Can you tell me any decent place to board?” She is sorry, regards me kindly with the expression I have grown to know—­the look the eyes adopt when a person of one class addresses her sister in a lower range.

“I am a stranger come out to work in the mills.”

But the young lady takes little interest in me.  Children are her care.  They surround her, clinging, laughing, calling—­little birds fed so gently by the womanly hand.  She turns from the working-woman to them, but not before indicating a shanty opposite: 

“Mrs. Green lives there in that four-room cottage.  She is a good woman.”

Through the door’s crack I interview Mrs. Green, a pallid, sickly creature, gowned, as are most of the women, in a calico garment made all in one piece.  She permits me to enter the room which forms (as do all the front rooms in a mill cottage) bedroom and general living-room.

Here is confusion incarnate—­and filthy disorder.  The tumbled, dirty bed fills up one-half the room.  In it is a little child, shaking with chills.  On the bare floor are bits of food, old vegetables, rags, dirty utensils of all sorts of domestic description.  The house has a sickening odour.  The woman tells me she is too ill to keep tidy—­too ill to keep boarders.  We do not strike a bargain.  “I am only here four months,” she said.  “Sick ever since I come, and my little girl has fevernaygu.”

I wander forth and a child directs me to a six-room cottage, “a real bo’din’-house.”  I attack it and thus discover the dwelling where I make my home in Excelsior.

From the front room of this dwelling a kitchen opens.  Within its shadow I see a Negro washing dishes.  A tall woman, taller than most men, angular, white-haired, her face seared by toil and stricken with age, greets me:  she is the landlady.  At her skirts, catching them and staring at a stranger, wanders a very young child—­a blue-eyed, clean little being; a great relief, in point of fact, to the general filth hitherto presented me.  The room beyond me is clean.  I draw a breath of gratitude.