with fresh yarn and reknitting broken strands.  This is all that there is of “spooling.”  It demands alertness, quickness and a certain amount of strength from the left arm, and that is all!  To conceive of a woman of intelligence pursuing this task from the age of eight years to twenty-two on down through incredible hours is not salutary.  You will say to me, that if she demands nothing more she is fit for nothing more.  I cannot think it.

The little girl who teaches me spooling is fresh and cheerful and jolly; I grant her all this.  She lives at home.  I am told by my subsequent friends that she thinks herself better than anybody.  This pride and ambition has at least elevated her to neat clothes and a sprightliness of manner that is refreshing.  She does not hesitate to evince her superiority by making sport of me.  She takes no pains to teach me well.  Instead of giving me the patent knotter, which would have simplified my job enormously, she teaches me what she expresses “the old-fashioned way”—­knotting the yarn with the fingers.  I have mastered this slow process by the time that the overseer discovers her trick and brings me the harness for my left hand.  She is full of curiosity about me, asking me every sort of question, to which I give the best answers that I can.  By and by she slips away from me.  I turn to find her; she has vanished, leaving me under the care of a truly kind, sad little creature in a wrapper dress.  This little Maggie has a heart of gold.

“Don’t you-all fret,” she consoles.  “That’s like Jeannie:  she’s so mean.  When you git to be a remarkable fine spooler she’ll want you on her side, you bet.”

She assists my awkwardness gently.

“I’ll learn you all right.  You-all kin stan’ hyar by me all day.  Jeannie clean fergits she was a greenhorn herself onct; we all wuz.  Whar you come from?”

“Lynn, Massachusetts.”

“Did you-all git worried with the train?  I only bin onto it onct, and it worried me for days!”

She tells me her simple annals with no question: 

“My paw he married ag’in, and me stepmother peard like she didn’t care for me; so one day I sez to paw, ‘I’m goin’ to work in the mills’—­an’ I lef home all alone and come here.”  After a little—­“When I sayd good-by to my father peard like he didn’t care neither.  I’m all alone here.  I bo’ds with that girl’s mother.”

I wore that day in the mill a blue-checked apron.  So did Maggie, but mine was from Wanamaker’s in New York, and had, I suppose, a certain style, for the child said: 

“I suttenly dew think that yere’s a awful pretty apron:  where’d you git it?”

“Where I came from,” I answered, and, I am sorry to say, it sounded brusque.  For the little thing blushed, fearful lest she had been indiscreet....(Oh, I assure you the qualities of good breeding are there!  Some of my factory and mill friends can teach the set in which I move lessons salutary!)