She thanked God for life and for strong hands to labor for her little ones. In those days furniture was rare, and few were the pieces in a worker's home. It took a dozen years for her to acquire two feather beds. And when at last we owned two bedsteads, we rated ourselves pretty rich. We boys slept five in a bed. Why were bedsteads in those days harder to get than automobiles are to-day? Because the wooden age still lingered, the age of hand work. And it took so long to make a bed by hand that people came into the world faster than beds. But within my lifetime the iron mills have made possible the dollar bedstead. The working man can fill his house with beds bought with the wage he earns in half a week. This, I suppose, is one of the “curses of capitalism.” I have heard how “the rights of small peoples” have been destroyed by capitalism; and if the right to sleep five in a bed was prized by the little folks, this privilege has certainly been taken away from them. At the Mooseheart School we are pinched for sleeping room for our fast-growing attendance. I suggested that, for the time being, we might double deck the beds like the berths in a sleeping car. “No,” cried the superintendent. “Not in this age do we permit the crowding of children in their sleeping quarters.” So this is the slavery that capitalism has driven us to; we are forced to give our children more comforts than we had ourselves. When I was sleeping five in a bed with my brothers, there was one long bolster for five hot little faces. The bolster got feverish and a boy sang out: “Raise up.” We lifted our tired heads. “Turn over.” Two boys turned the bolster. “Lie down.” And we put our faces on the cool side and went to sleep. Those were not hardships, and life was sweet, and we awoke from our crowded bed, like birds in a nest awakened by their mother's morning song. For, as I have said, my mother was always singing. Her voice was our consolation and delight. One of the most charming recollections of my boyhood is that of my mother standing at our gate with a lamp in her hands, sending one boy out in the early morning darkness, to his work, and at the same time welcoming another boy home. My brother was on the day shift and I on the night, which meant that he left home as I was leaving the mills, about half past two in the morning. On dark nights--and they were all dark at that hour--my mother, thinking my little brother afraid, would go with him to the gate and, holding an old-fashioned lamp high in her hands, would sing some Welsh song while he trudged out toward the mills and until he got within the radius of the glare from the stacks as they. belched forth the furnace flames. And as he passed from the light of the old oil burner into the greater light from the mills, I walked wearily out from that reflection and was guided home by my mother's lamp and song on her lips.