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Page 15
I believe, when I commenced that sentence, I intended to say that it
would be difficult to find Lawrence's equal.
Of the twenty-five thousand souls who inhabit that city, ten thousand
are operatives in the factories. Of these ten thousand two thirds are
girls.
These pages are written as one sets a bit of marble to mark a mound. I
linger over them as we linger beside the grave of one who sleeps well;
half sadly, half gladly,--more gladly than sadly,--but hushed.
The time to see Lawrence is when the mills open or close. So languidly
the dull-colored, inexpectant crowd wind in! So briskly they come
bounding out! Factory faces have a look of their own,--not only their
common dinginess, and a general air of being in a hurry to find the
wash-bowl, but an appearance of restlessness,--often of envious
restlessness, not habitual in most departments of "healthy labor." Watch
them closely: you can read their histories at a venture. A widow this,
in the dusty black, with she can scarcely remember how many mouths to
feed at home. Worse than widowed that one: she has put her baby out to
board,--and humane people know what that means,--to keep the little
thing beyond its besotted father's reach. There is a group who have
"just come over." A child's face here, old before its time. That
girl--she climbs five flights of stairs twice a day--will climb no more
stairs for herself or another by the time the clover-leaves are green.
"The best thing about one's grave is that it will be level," she was
heard once to say. Somebody muses a little here,--she is to be married
this winter. There is a face just behind her whose fixed eyes repel and
attract you; there may be more love than guilt in them, more despair
than either.
Had you stood in some unobserved corner of Essex Street, at four o'clock
one Saturday afternoon towards the last of November, 1859, watching the
impatient stream pour out of the Pemberton Mill, eager with a saddening
eagerness for its few holiday hours, you would have observed one girl
who did not bound.
She was slightly built, and undersized; her neck and shoulders were
closely muffled, though the day was mild; she wore a faded scarlet hood
which heightened the pallor of what must at best have been a pallid
face. It was a sickly face, shaded off with purple shadows, but with a
certain wiry nervous strength about the muscles of the mouth and chin:
it would have been a womanly, pleasant mouth, had it not been crossed by
a white scar, which attracted more of one's attention than either the
womanliness or pleasantness. Her eyes had light long lashes, and shone
through them steadily.
You would have noticed as well, had you been used to analyzing crowds,
another face,--the two were side by side,--dimpled with pink and white
flushes, and framed with bright black hair. One would laugh at this girl
and love her, scold her and pity her, caress her and pray for her,--then
forget her perhaps.
The girls from behind called after her: "Del! Del Ivory! look over
there!"
Pretty Del turned her head. She had just flung a smile at a young clerk
who was petting his mustache in a shop-window, and the smile lingered.
One of the factory boys was walking alone across the Common in his
factory clothes.
"Why, there's Dick! Sene, do you see?"
Sene's scarred mouth moved slightly, but she made no reply. She had seen
him five minutes ago.
One never knows exactly whether to laugh or cry over them, catching
their chatter as they file past the show-windows of the long, showy
street.
"Look a' that pink silk with the figures on it!"
"I've seen them as is betther nor that in the ould counthree.--Patsy
Malorrn, let alon' hangin' onto the shawl of me!"
"That's Mary Foster getting out of that carriage with the two white
horses,--she that lives in the brown house with the cupilo."
"Look at her dress trailin' after her. I'd like my dresses trailin'
after me."
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