“Mrs. Jones?”

“Yes, this is Jones’ bo’din’-house.”

The old woman has a comb in her hand; she has “jest ben com’in’ Letty’s hair.”  Letty smiles delightedly.

“This yere’s the child of the lady upstairs.  The mother’s a pore sick thing.”  Mrs. Jones bends the stiffness of sixty-eight years over the stranger’s child.  “And grandmaw keeps Letty clean, don’t she, Letty?  She don’t never whip her, neither; jest a little cross to her.”

“Can I find lodging here?”

She looks at me.  “Yes, ma’am, you kin.  I’m full up; got a lot of gentlemen bo’ders, but not many ladies.  I got one bed up aloft; you can’t have it alone neither, and the baby’s mother is sick up there, too.  Nuthin’ ketchin’.  She come here a stranger; the mill was too hard on her; she’s ben sick fo’ days.”

I had made a quick decision and accepted half a bed.  I would return at noon.

“Stranger hyar, I reckon?”

“Yes; from Massachusetts.  A shoe-hand.”

She shakes her head:  “You wont like the mills.”

She draws Letty between her old stiff knees, seats herself on a straight chair, and combs the child’s hair on either side its pathetic, gentle little face.  So I leave her for the present to return to Columbia and fetch back with me my bundle of clothes.

* * * * *

When I return at noon it is dinner time.  I enter and am introduced, with positive grace and courtesy, by my dear old landlady to her son-in-law, “Tommy Jones,” a widower, a man in decent store clothes and a Derby hat surrounded by a majestic crape sash.  He is nonchalantly loading a large revolver, and thrusts it in his trousers pocket:  “Always carry it,” he explains; “comes handy!” Then I am presented to the gentlemen boarders.  I beg to go upstairs, with my bundles, and I see for the first time my dwelling part of this shanty.

A ladderlike stair leading directly from the kitchen takes me into the loft.  Heavens! the sight of that sleeping apartment!  There are three beds in it, sagging beds, covered by calico comforters.  The floor is bare; the walls are bare.  I have grown to know that “Jones’” is the cleanliest place in the Excelsior village, and yet to our thinking it lacks perfection.  Around the bare walls hang the garments of the other women who share the room with me.  What humble and pathetic decorations! poor, miserable clothes—­a shawl or two, a coat or two, a cotton wrapper, a hat; and on one nail the miniature clothes of Letty—­a little night-dress and a tiny blue cotton dress.  I put my bundle down by the side of my bed which I am to share with another woman, and descend, for Mrs. Jones’ voice summons me to the midday meal.

The nourishment provided for these thirteen-hour-a-day labourers is as follows:  On a tin saucepan there was a little salt pork and on another dish a pile of grease-swimming spinach.  A ragged Negro hovered over these articles of diet; the room was full of the smell of frying.  After the excitement of my search for work, and the success, if success it can be called that so far had met me, I could not eat; I did not even sit down.  I made my excuse.  I said that I had had something to eat in Columbia, and started out to the mill.