This premature launching forth into the world of wage-earners had left its mark upon Annie Kenney. Her features had been sharpened by it, and her eager face that flushed so easily was far more deeply lined than are the faces of girls whose childhood has been prolonged. Those wide, wide eyes of hers, so wonderfully blue, though at rare moments they could dance and sparkle like a fountain in the sunshine, were more often filled with pain, anxiety and foreboding, or with a longing restless, searching, unsatisfied and far away. A member of a very large family, Annie had four sisters--Nellie, Kitty, Jennie, and Jessie--who came nearest her in age and had been her companions in the cotton mill. In spite of the fact that they were constantly obliged to rise at four or five in the morning, in order to reach the factory gates at six o'clock, and on returning home were obliged first to help to do the housework and prepare the evening meal for the rest of the family, these girls were all determined to continue their education, and they regularly attended the Oldham night schools. At the time when we first met Annie, Nellie and Kitty, the two eldest of the sisters, had both worked their way out of the cotton mill. Nellie had become a shop assistant, and had soon proved herself so able that she had been put in charge of two of her employer's shops, whilst Kitty had passed the necessary examinations and had obtained a post as an elementary school teacher, and Jennie, though still in the mill, was studying with the same object. Jessie, who was but sixteen, was learning typewriting and shorthand. Annie, who was then twenty-five, was unlike her sisters in many ways. She frequently said that she was not so "clever" as her sisters, but when any decisive step was to be taken or any question of principle to be decided, it was always Annie who took the lead. There is not much that is beautiful in a small Lancashire manufacturing town, but what little there was, Annie Kenney contrived to make the most of. She was a regular attendant at the Church, and delighted in the beauty of the music; the Whitsuntide processions, in which she walked with the other Sunday-school children all in their white dresses, being vivid memories with her still. She early commenced to carry on a literary campaign amongst her work-mates and, having come across a copy of the penny weekly paper "The Clarion," in which Robert Blatchford was publishing a series of articles on his "favourite books," contrived to procure some of the works which were there mentioned, and introduced them to her companions.