I was a “little doffer” until I became old enough to earn more money; then I tended a spinning-frame for a little while; and after that I learned, on the Merrimack corporation, to be a drawing-in girl, which was considered one of the most desirable employments, as about only a dozen girls were needed in each mill. We drew in, one by one, the threads of the warp, through the harness and the reed, and so made the beams ready for the weaver’s loom. I still have the two hooks I used so long, companions of many a dreaming hour, and preserve them as the “badge of all my tribe” of drawing-in girls. It may be well to add that, although so many changes have been made in mill-work, during the last fifty years, by the introduction of machinery, this part of it still continues to be done by hand, and the drawing-in girl--I saw her last winter, as in my time--still sits on her high stool, and with her little hook patiently draws in the thousands of threads, one by one. CHAPTER III. THE LITTLE MILL-GIRL’S ALMA MATER. The education of a child is an all-around process, and he or she owes only a part of it to school or college training. The child to whom neither college nor school is open must find his whole education in his surroundings, and in the life he is forced to lead. As the cotton-factory was the means of the early schooling of so large a number of men and women, who, without the opportunity thus afforded, could not have been mentally so well developed, I love to call it their _Alma Mater_. For, without this incentive to labor, this chance to earn extra money and to use it in their own way, their influence on the times, and also, to a certain extent, on modern civilization, would certainly have been lost. I had been to school quite constantly until I was nearly eleven years of age, and then, after going into the mill, I went to some of the evening schools that had been established, and which were always well filled with those who desired to improve their scant education, or to supplement what they had learned in the village school or academy. Here might often be seen a little girl puzzling over her sums in Colburn’s Arithmetic, and at her side another “girl” of fifty poring over her lesson in Pierpont’s National Reader. Some of these schools were devoted to special studies. I went to a geography school, where the lessons were repeated in unison in a monotonous sing-song tone, like this: “Lake Winni_peg_! Lake Winni_peg_! Lake Titi_caca_! Lake Titi_caca_! _Mem_phre_ma_gog! _Mem_phre_ma_gog!” and also to a school where those who fancied they had thoughts were taught by Newman’s Rhetoric to express them in writing. In this school, the relative position of the subject and the predicate was not always well taught by the master; but never to mix a metaphor or to confuse a simile was a lesson he firmly fixed in the minds of his pupils.