I accost her. "Can you tell me any decent place to board?" She is sorry, regards me kindly with the expression I have grown to know--the look the eyes adopt when a person of one class addresses her sister in a lower range. "I am a stranger come out to work in the mills." But the young lady takes little interest in me. Children are her care. They surround her, clinging, laughing, calling--little birds fed so gently by the womanly hand. She turns from the working-woman to them, but not before indicating a shanty opposite: "Mrs. Green lives there in that four-room cottage. She is a good woman." Through the door's crack I interview Mrs. Green, a pallid, sickly creature, gowned, as are most of the women, in a calico garment made all in one piece. She permits me to enter the room which forms (as do all the front rooms in a mill cottage) bedroom and general living-room. Here is confusion incarnate--and filthy disorder. The tumbled, dirty bed fills up one-half the room. In it is a little child, shaking with chills. On the bare floor are bits of food, old vegetables, rags, dirty utensils of all sorts of domestic description. The house has a sickening odour. The woman tells me she is too ill to keep tidy--too ill to keep boarders. We do not strike a bargain. "I am only here four months," she said. "Sick ever since I come, and my little girl has fevernaygu." I wander forth and a child directs me to a six-room cottage, "a real bo'din'-house." I attack it and thus discover the dwelling where I make my home in Excelsior. From the front room of this dwelling a kitchen opens. Within its shadow I see a Negro washing dishes. A tall woman, taller than most men, angular, white-haired, her face seared by toil and stricken with age, greets me: she is the landlady. At her skirts, catching them and staring at a stranger, wanders a very young child--a blue-eyed, clean little being; a great relief, in point of fact, to the general filth hitherto presented me. The room beyond me is clean. I draw a breath of gratitude. "Mrs. Jones?" "Yes, this is Jones' bo'din'-house." The old woman has a comb in her hand; she has "jest ben com'in' Letty's hair." Letty smiles delightedly. "This yere's the child of the lady upstairs. The mother's a pore sick thing." Mrs. Jones bends the stiffness of sixty-eight years over the stranger's child. "And grandmaw keeps Letty clean, don't she, Letty? She don't never whip her, neither; jest a little cross to her." "Can I find lodging here?" She looks at me. "Yes, ma'am, you kin. I'm full up; got a lot of gentlemen bo'ders, but not many ladies. I got one bed up aloft; you can't have it alone neither, and the baby's mother is sick up there, too. Nuthin' ketchin'. She come here a stranger; the mill was too hard on her; she's ben sick fo' days." I had made a quick decision and accepted half a bed. I would return at noon. "Stranger hyar, I reckon?" "Yes; from Massachusetts. A shoe-hand."