“I didn’t mean jest ’xactly wherebouts,” she murmurs; “I only meant it warn’t from these parts.”

* * * * *

During the afternoon the gay Jeannie returns and presents to me a tin box.  It is filled with a black powder.  “Want some?” Well, what is it?  She greets my ignorance with shrieks of laughter.  In a trice half a dozen girls have left their spooling and cluster around me.

“She ain’t never seen it!” and the little creature fills her mouth with the powder which she keeps under her tongue.  “It is snuff!”

They all take it, old and young, even the smallest children.  Their mouths are brown with it; their teeth are black with it.  They take it and smell it and carry it about under their tongues all day in a black wad, spitting it all over the floor.  Others “dip,” going about with the long sticks in their mouths.  The air of the room is white with cotton, although the spool-room is perhaps the freest.  These little particles are breathed into the nose, drawn into the lungs.  Lung disease and pneumonia—­consumption—­are the constant, never-absent scourge of the mill village.  The girls expectorate to such an extent that the floor is nauseous with it; the little girls practise spitting and are adepts at it.

Over there is a woman of sixty, spooling; behind the next side is a child, not younger than eight, possibly, but so small that she has to stand on a box to reach her side.  Only the very young girls show any trace of buoyancy; the older ones have accepted with more or less complaint the limitation of their horizons.  They are drawn from the hill district with traditions no better than the loneliness, desertion and inexperience of the fever-stricken mountains back of them.  They are illiterate, degraded; the mill has been their widest experience; and all their tutelage is the intercourse of girl to girl during the day and in the evenings the few moments before they go to bed in the mill-houses, where they either live at home with parents and brothers all working like themselves, or else they are fugitive lodgers in a boarding-house or a hotel, where their morals are in jeopardy constantly.  As soon as a girl passes the age, let us say of seventeen or eighteen, there is no hesitation in her reply when you ask her:  “Do you like the mills?” Without exception the answer is, “I hate them.”

Absorbed with the novelty of learning my trade, the time goes swiftly.  Yet even the interest and excitement does not prevent fatigue, and from 12:45 to 6:45 seems interminable!  Even when the whistle blows we are not all free—­Excelsior is behindhand with her production, and those whom extra pay can beguile stay on.  Maggie, my little teacher, walks with me toward our divided destinations, her quasi-home and mine.

Neither in the mill nor the shoe-shops did I take precaution to change my way of speaking—­and not once had it been commented upon.  To-day Maggie says to me: