The year 1829 found the Lowell mills in straits for lack of capital, from which, however, they were promptly relieved by two great merchants of Boston, Amos and Abbott Lawrence, who now became partners in the business and who afterwards founded the city named for them farther down on the Merrimac River. The story of the Lowell cotton factories, for twenty years, more or less, until the American girls operating the machines came to be supplanted by French Canadians and Irish, is appropriately summed up in the title of a book which describes the factory life in Lowell during those years. The title of this book is "An Idyl of Work" and it was written by Lucy Larcom, who was herself one of the operatives and whose mother kept one of the corporation boarding-houses. And Lucy Larcom was not the only one of the Lowell "factory girls" who took to writing and lecturing. There were many others, notably, Harriet Hanson (later Mrs. W. S. Robinson), Harriot Curtis ("Mina Myrtle"), and Harriet Farley; and many of the "factory girls" married men who became prominent in the world. There was no thought among them that there was anything degrading in factory work. Most of the girls came from the surrounding farms, to earn money for a trousseau, to send a brother through college, to raise a mortgage, or to enjoy the society of their fellow workers, and have a good time in a quiet, serious way, discussing the sermons and lectures they heard and the books they read in their leisure hours. They had numerous "improvement circles" at which contributions of the members in both prose and verse were read and discussed. And for several years they printed a magazine, "The Lowell Offering", which was entirely written and edited by girls in the mills.