In the room where we sit Jones' wife died a few weeks before, victim to pneumonia that all winter has scourged the town--"the ketchin' kind"--that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by many.[6] [Footnote 6: There are no statistics, they tell me, kept of births, marriages or deaths in this State; it is less surprising that the mill village has none.] In one corner stands a sewing machine, in another an organ--luxuries: in these cases, objects of art. They are bought on the installment plan, and some of these girls pay as high as $100 for the organ in monthly payments of $4 at a time. The mill-girl is too busy to use the machine and too ignorant to play the organ. Jones is a courteous host. His lodgers occupy the comfortable seats, whilst he perches himself on the edge of a straight high-backed chair and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged, then deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs. I feel convinced that Jones thinks that Massachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the social scale than South Carolina mill-girls! Because, after being witness more than once to my morning and evening ablutions on the back steps, he said: "Now, I am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all; I'm goin' to fix up a wash-stand in that there loft." This is a triumph over the lax, uncleanly shiftlessness of the Southern settlement. Again: "You-all must of had good food whar you come from: your skin shows it; 'tain't much like hyar-'bouts. Why, I'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if I met her at the North Pole--salla, pale, sickly." I might have added for him, deathlike, ... skeleton ... _doomed_. But I listen, rocking in the best chair, whilst Mrs. White glides in from the kitchen and, unobserved, takes her place on a little low chair by the sewing machine behind Jones. Her baby rocks contentedly in Molly's arms.