Katie Robertson : $b A girls story of factory lifeWinslow, Margaret E.
General
Katie Robertson : $b A girls story of factory life
Winslow, Margaret E.
Factories -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
On the other side of the street was a long row of brick cottages, each
inhabited by two or more families, the distinctive sign of each being
the family pig, kept, for greater convenience, in the front yard, from
which odors, not the most choice in their nature, were constantly wafted
across the way. In the doorways of most of these lounged Irishmen
smoking and swearing, in some cases in a state of intoxication; for,
although the rules of the mill concerning drinking were very strict, and
no habitual drinker was ever knowingly engaged in it, it was impossible
to prevent the men from depositing a part of the earnings received every
Saturday night in the hands of one or two liquor-dealers whom the law
licensed to sell death and ruin to their fellow-men.
How dreadful, thought the young lady, to be compelled to spend one's
life in such wretched surroundings. Is it any wonder that the women
become hopeless slatterns, and that the children grow up in vice and
sin? How thankful I ought to be to the heavenly Father who has
surrounded me with such different influences! how I wish I might do
something to raise and elevate these, and give them a few of the
blessings of which I have so many!
Etta Mountjoy had grown since that early June Sunday when she had
visited her pastor in such sorrow and perplexity. She had read and seen
and thought more and more of the wonderful love of our heavenly Father
in surrounding her with so many blessings and in sending his only Son to
be her Saviour and friend. She looked back upon the life of
self-pleasing she had so long led with sorrow amounting to disgust. How
could she have been so ungrateful? How could she have failed to love One
so altogether lovely? She was learning now to find pleasure in prayer,
and the Bible, which had been to her such a dull book, began to be more
interesting than any story which she had formerly devoured. And she was
trying, faintly and with many relapses, it is true, to take up her
neglected duties, especially those which had been most distasteful to
her, and perform them steadily "as unto the Lord." Out of all this was
springing up in her a desire to do something for Christ--something which
would be, if not a return for his favors, at least a token of her
gratitude to him. To-night just such an opportunity as she had desired
came to her hand.
If Etta had only known it, the dwellings of the operatives at Squantown
were palatial compared to those into which the working-classes are
huddled in cities; for here the many windows opened upon pure fresh air
and green fields, the little yards were scrupulously clean, and vines
clambered up the sides of the doors and windows, even to the roofs. The
fare, plain as it was, was not tainted by exposure in a city market, or
by being hawked about the city streets, and the price of living was no
higher than the wages received in the mill enabled the people to pay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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