The agent of the corporation where I then worked took some small revenges on the supposed ringleaders; on the principle of sending the weaker to the wall, my mother was turned away from her boarding-house, that functionary saying, “Mrs. Hanson, you could not prevent the older girls from turning out, but your daughter is a child, and _her_ you could control.” It is hardly necessary to say that so far as results were concerned this strike did no good. The dissatisfaction of the operatives subsided, or burned itself out, and though the authorities did not accede to their demands, the majority returned to their work, and the corporation went on cutting down the wages. And after a time, as the wages became more and more reduced, the best portion of the girls left and went to their homes, or to the other employments that were fast opening to women, until there were very few of the old guard left; and thus the _status_ of the factory population of New England gradually became what we know it to be to-day. Some of us took part in a political campaign, for the first time, in 1840, when William H. Harrison, the first Whig President, was elected; we went to the political meetings, sat in the gallery, heard speeches against Van Buren and the Democratic party, and helped sing the great campaign song beginning:-- “Oh have you heard the news of late?” the refrain of which was: “Tippecanoe and Tyler too, Oh with them we’ll beat little Van, Van, Van is a used-up man.” And we named our sunbonnets “log-cabins,” and set our teacups (we drank from saucers then) in little glass tea-plates, with log-cabins impressed on the bottom. The part the Lowell mill-girls took in these and similar events serves to show how wide-awake and up to date many of these middle-century working-women were. Among the _fads_ of those days may be mentioned those of the “water-cure” and the “Grahamite.” The former was a theory of doctoring by means of cold water, used as packs, daily baths, and immoderate drinks. Quite a number of us adopted this practice, and one at least has not even yet wholly abandoned it. Several members of my mother’s family adopted “Professor” Graham’s regimen, and for a few months we ate no meat, nor, as he said, “anything that had life in it.” It was claimed that this would regenerate the race; that by following a certain line of diet, a person would live longer, do better work, and be able to endure any hardship, in fact, that not what we were, but what we ate, would be the making of us. Two young men, whom I knew, made their boasts that they had “walked from Boston to Lowell on an apple.”