August 18, 2025 • 24 mins
Step back into the 1800s and experience the life of a seaside country girl in New England. Discover her dreams, aspirations, and the realities of her education and opportunities as she navigates a world shaped by her familys needs. At just 11 years old, she begins working in the Lowell Textile Mills in Massachusetts to support her family—a journey that leads her to edit magazines, teach at Wheaton College, and pen enchanting books filled with her hopes, memories, poetry, and profound insights on life. As she beautifully reflects, “Every little thread must take its place as warp or woof, and keep in it steadily... that we are entirely separate, while yet we entirely belong to the Whole, is a truth that we learn to rejoice in.” The preface, positioned at the end, serves as a fascinating historical afterward that enhances Lucys vivid narratives from the very first page. (Summary by Michele Fry, Book Coordinator)
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter nine of A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Read by Dorian Marcott, A New
England Girlhood, Chapter nine, Mountain Friends. The pleasure we found
(00:23):
in making new acquaintances among our workmates arose partly from
their having come from great distances, regions unknown to us,
as the northern districts of Maine and New Hampshire and
Vermont were. In those days of stagecoach traveling, when railroads
had as yet only connected the larger cities with one another,
it seemed wonderful to me to be talking with anybody
(00:43):
who had really seen mountains and lived among them. One
of the younger girls who worked beside me during my
very first days in the mill had come from far
up near the sources of the Merrimac, and she told
me a great deal about her home and about farm
life among the hills. Almost with awe when she said
that she lived in a valley where the sun set
up four o'clock and where the great snowstorms drifted in,
(01:07):
so that sometimes they did not see a neighbor for weeks.
To have mountain summons, looking down upon one out of
the clouds summer and winter, by day and by night
seemed to be something both delightful and terrible. And yet
here was this girl, to whom it all appeared like
the merest commonplace. What she felt about it was that
it was awful cold. Sometimes the days were so short,
(01:30):
and it grew dark so early. Then she told me
about the spinning and the husking and the sugar making,
while we sat in a corner together waiting to replace
the full spools by empty ones, the work usually given
to the little girls. I had a great admiration for
this girl because she had come from those wilderness regions.
The scent of pine woods and checkerberry leaves seemed to
(01:52):
hang about her. I believed I liked her all the
better because she said down and how it was part
of the mountain flavor. I tried, on my part to
impress her with stories of the sea, but I did
not succeed very well. Her principal comment was, they don't
think much of sailor's u by our way. And I
(02:12):
received the impression from her and others, and from my
own imagination that rural life was far more delightful than
the life of towns. But there is something in the
place where we were born that holds us always by
the heart strings. A town that still has a great
deal of the country in it, one that is rich
in beautiful scenery and ancestral associations, is almost like a
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living being with a body and a soul. We speak
of such a town, if our birthplace, as of a mother,
I think of ourselves as their sons and daughters. So
we felt, my sisters and I about our dear native
town of Beverly. It's miles of sea border almost every
sunny cove and rocky headland of which was a part
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of some near relatives homestead were only half a day's
journey distant, and the misty ocean spaces beyond still widening
out on our imagination from the green inland landscape around us.
But the hills sometimes shut us in body and soul.
To those who have been reared by the sea, a
wide horizon is a necessity, both for the mind and
(03:18):
for the eye. We had many opportunities of escape towards
our native shores. For the larger part of our large
family still remained there, and there was a constant coming
and going among us. The stage coach driver looked upon
us as it especial charge, and we had a sense
of personal property. In the Salem and Lowell stage coach,
which had once like a fairy godmother's coach, rumbled down
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into our own little lane, taking possession of us, and
carried us off to a new home. My married sisters
had families growing up about them, and they liked to
have us younger ones come and help take care of
their babies. One of them sent for me just when
the close air and long day's work were beginning to
tell upon my health, and it was decided that I
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had better go. The salt wind soon restored my strength,
and those months of quiet family life were very good
for me. Like most young girls, I had a motherly
fondness for little children, and my two baby nephews were
my pride and delight. The older one had a delicate constitution,
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and there was a thoughtful, questioning look in his eyes
that seemed to gaze forward almost sadly, and foresee that
he should never attain to manhood. The younger, a plump,
vigorous urchin three or four months old, did without doubt
feel his life in every limb. He was my especial
(04:42):
charge for his brother's clinging weakness. Gave him the first born,
the place nearest his mother's heart. The baby bore the
family name mine and his mother's, Our little lark, we
sometimes called him for his wide awakeness and his merry heartedness.
Alas neither of those beautiful boys grew up to be men.
(05:04):
One page of my whole memories is sadly written over
with the elegy the graves of a household, father, mother,
and four sons, an entire family long since passed away
from earthly sight. The tie between my lovely baby nephew
and myself became very close. The first two years of
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a child's life are its most appealing years, and call
out all the latent tenderness of the nature on which
it leans for protection. I think I should have missed
out of the best educating influences of my youth if
I had not had the care of that baby for
a year or more, just as I entered my teens,
I was never so happy as when I held him
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in my arms, sleeping or waking, and he happy anywhere,
was always contented. When he was with me, I was
as fond as ever of reading, and somehow I managed
to combine baby and book. Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop was
just then coming out in the Philadelphia Weekly paper, and
(06:06):
I read it with the baby playing at my feet
or lying across my lap in an unfinished room given
up to sea chests and coffee bags and spicy foreign odors.
My cherub's papa, with a sea captain, usually away on
his African voyages. Little Nell and her grandfather became as
real to me as my darling charge, and a fittear
(06:28):
from his nurse's eyes sometimes dropped upon his cheek as
he slept. He was not saddened by it. When he awoke,
he was irrepressible, clutching at my hair with his stout
pink fists and driving all dream people effectually out of
my head. Like all babies, he was something of a tyrant.
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But that brief sweet despotism ends only too soon. I
put him gratefully down, dimpled, chubby, and imperious upon the
list of my girlhood's teachers. My sister had no domestic
health besides mine, so I learned a good deal about
general housework. A girl's preparation for life was in those
days considered quite imperfect. Who had no practical knowledge of
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that kind. We were taught, indeed, how to do everything
that a woman might be called upon to do under
any circumstances, for herself or for the household she lived in.
It was one of the advantages of the old simple
way of living that the young daughters of the house were,
as a matter of course, instructed in all these things.
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They acquired the habit of being ready for emergencies, and
the family that required no outside assistance, was delightfully independent.
A young woman would have been considered a very inefficient
being who could not make and mend, and wash and
iron her own clothing, and get three regular meals and
clear them away every day, besides keeping the house tidy
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and doing any other needed neighborly service, such as sitting
all night by a sick bed. To be a good
watcher was considered one of the most important of womanly attainments.
People who lived side by side exchanged such services without
waiting to be asked, and they seemed to be happiest
of whom such kindnesses were most expected. Every kind of
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work brings its own compensations and attractions. I really began
to like playing sewing. I enjoyed sitting down for a
whole afternoon of it, fingers flying and thoughts flying faster still,
the motion of the hand seeming to set the mind astir.
Such afternoons used to bring me throngs of poetic suggestions,
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particularly if I sat by an open window and could
hear the wind blowing and a burden too singing. Nature
is often very generous in opening her heart to those
who must keep their hands employed. Perhaps it is because
she is always quietly at work herself, and so sympathizes
with her busy human friends. And possibly there was no
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needful ocution patient, which is wholly unbeautiful. The beauty of
work depends upon the way we meet it, whether we
arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy
that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we
open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as
an approaching friend who will keep us delightful company all day,
and who will make us feel at evening that the
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day was well worth its fatigues. I found my practical
experience of housekeeping and baby tending very useful to me
afterwards at the west, and my sister Emily's family when
she was disabled by illness. I think, indeed, that every
item of real knowledge I ever acquired has come into
you somewhere or somehow in the course of the years.
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But these were not the things I had most wished
to do. The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me,
a world of which I had already caught large and
tempting glimpses. And I did not like to feel the
horizon shutting me in, even to so pleasant a corner
as this. And the worst of it was that I
was getting too easy and contented, too indifferent to the
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higher realities which my work and my thoughtful companions had
kept keenly clear before me. I felt myself slipping into
an inward apathy from which it was hard to rouse myself.
I could not let it go on, so I must
be where my life could expand. It was hard to
leave the dear little fellow I had taught to walk
(10:25):
and to talk, but I knew he would not be inconsolable,
so I only said I must go, and turned my
back upon the sea and my face to the banks
of the Merrimac. When I returned, I found that I
enjoyed even the familiar, unremitting clatter of the mill, because
it indicated that something was going on. I liked to
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feel the people around me, even those whom I did
not know. As a wave may like to feel the
surrounding waves urging it forward with or against its own will.
I felt that I belonged to the world, that there
was something for me to do in it, though I
had not yet found out what something to do. It
might be very little, but still it would be my
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own work. And then there was the better, something which
I had almost forgotten to be. Underneath my dull thoughts,
the old aspirations were smoldering, the old ideals rose and
beckoned to me through the rekindling light. It was always aspiration,
rather than ambition, by which I felt myself stirred. I
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did not care to outstrip others and become what is
called distinguished without a possibility, so much as I longed
to answer the voice that invited ever receding up to
invisible heights, however unattainable they might seem. I was conscious
of a desire that others should feel something coming to
them out of my life, Like the breath of flowers,
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the whisper of the winds, the warmth of the sunshine,
and the depth of the sky that I felt did
not require great gifts or of fine education. We might
all be that to each other, and there was no
opportunity for vanity or pride in receiving a beautiful influence
and giving it out again. I do not suppose that
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I definitely thought all this, though I find that the
verses I wrote for our two meal magazines at about
this time often expressed these and similar longings. They were vague,
and they were too likely to dissipate themselves in mere dreams.
But our aspirations come to us from a source far
beyond ourselves. Happy are they who are not disobedient unto
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the heavenly vision. A girl of sixteen sees the world
before her through rose tinted mists, a blending of celestial
colors and earthly exhalations, and she cannot separate their elements
if she would, they all belong to the landscape of
her youth. It is a mystery of the meeting horizons,
the visible beauty seeking to lose and find itself in
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the invisible. In returning to my daily toil among workmates
from the hill country. The scenery to which they belonged
became also a part of my life. They brought the
mountains with them, a new background and a new hope.
We shared an uneven path and homely occupations. But above
us hung glorious summits, never wholly out of sight. Every
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blossom and every dewdrop at our feet was touched with
some tint of that far off splendor, and every pebble
by the wayside was a messenger from the peak that
our feet would stand upon by and by. The true
climber knows the delight of trusting his path, of following
it without seeing a step before him, or a glimpse
of blue sky above him, sometimes only knowing that it
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is a right path, because it is the only one,
and because it leads upward. This our daily duty was
to us, so we did not always know it. The
faithful plotter was sure to win the heights. Unconsciously we
learn the lesson that only by a humble doing can
any of us win the lofty possibilities of being. For indeed,
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what we all want to find is not so much
our place as our path. The path leads to the
place and the place when we have found it is
only a clearing by the road side and opening into
another path. And no comrades are so dear as those
who have broken with us a pioneer road which it
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will be safe and good for others to follow, which
will furnish a plain clue for all bewildered travelers hereafter.
There is no more exhilarating human experience than this, And
perhaps it is the highest angelic one. It may be
that some such mutual work is to link us forever
with one another in the infinite life. The girls who
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toiled together at Lowell were clearing away a few weeds
from the overgone track of independent labor for other women.
He practically said, by numbering themselves among factory girls, that
in our country no real odium could be attached to
any honest toil that any self respecting women might undertake.
I regarded as one of the privileges of my youth
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that I was permitted to grow up among these active,
interesting girls, whose lives were not mere echoes of other lives,
but had principle and purpose distinctly their own. Their vagar
of character was a natural development the New Hampshire girls
who came to Lowell were descendants of the sturdy backwardsmen
who settled that state scarcely one hundred years before. Their
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grandmothers had suffered the hardships of frontier life, had known
the horrors of savage warfare, when the beautiful valleys of
the Connecticut and the Merrimack were threaded with Indian trails
from Canada to the white settlements. Those young women did
justice to their inheritance. They were earnest and capable, ready
to undertake anything that was worth doing. My dreamy, indolate
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nature was shamed into activity among them. They gave me
a larger, firmer ideal of womanhood. Often during the many
summers and autumns that of late years, I have spent
among the New Hampshire hills, sometimes far up the mountain sides,
where I could listen to the first song of the
little brooks setting out on their journey to join the
very river that float at my feet when I was
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a working girl on its banks the Merrimac, I have
felt as if I could also hear the early music
of my workmates lives, those who were born among these
glorious summits, pure, strong, crystalline natures, carrying down with them
the light of blue skies and the freshness of free
winds to their place of toil, Broadening and strengthening as
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they went on. Who can tell how they have refreshed
the world, how beautifully they have blended their being with
the great ocean of results. A brook slipe is like
the life of a maiden. The rivers received their strength
on the rock born rills from the unfailing purity of
the mountain. A girl's place in the world is a
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very strong one. It is a pity that she does
not always see it. So it is strongest through her
natural impulse to steady herself by leaning upon the eternal
life the only reality. And a weakness comes also from
her inclination to lean against something, upon an unworthy support
rather than none at all. She often unless her life
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get broken into fragments among the flimsy trellises of fashion
and conventionality, when it might be a perfect thing in
the upright beauty of its own contricated freedom. Yet girlhood
seldom appreciates itself. We often hear a girl wishing that
she were a boy. That seems so strange. God made
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no mistake in her creation. He sent her into the
world full of power and will to be a helper,
and only he knows how much his world needs help.
She is here to make this great house of humanity
a habitable and a beautiful place without and within, a
true home for every one of his children. It matters
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not if she is poor, if she has to toil
for her daily bread, or even if she is surrounded
by coarseness and uncongeniality. Nothing can deprive her of her
natural instinct to help, of her birthright as a helper.
These very hindrances may, with faith and patience, develop in
her a nobler womanhood. No let girls be as thankful
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that they are girls as that they are human beings,
for they, also, according to His own loving plans for them,
were created in the image of God. Their real power.
The divine dowry of womanhood is that of receiving and
giving inspiration. In this a girl often surpasses her brother,
and it is for her to hold firmly and faithfully
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to her holiest instincts, so that when he lets his
standard droop, she may, through her spiritual strength, be a
standard bearer for him. Courage and self reliance are now
held to be virtues as womanly as they are manly.
For the world has grown wise enough to see that
nothing except a life can really help another life. It
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is strange that it should have ever held any other
theory about woman. That was the true use of the
word help that grew up so naturally in the rendering
and receiving a womanly service in the old fashioned New
England household. A girl came into a family as one
of the home group, to share its burdens, to feel
that they were her own. The woman who employed her,
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if her nature was at all generous, could not feel
that money alone was an equivalent for a heart service.
She added to it her friendship, her gratitude and esteem.
The domestic problem can never be rightly settled until the
old idea of mutual help is in some way restored.
This is the question for girls of the p present
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generation to consider, and she who can bring about a
practical solution of it will win the world's gratitude. We
used sometimes to see it claimed in public prints that
it would be better for all of us mill girls
to be working in families at domestic service than to
be where we were. Perhaps the difficulties of modern housekeepers
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did begin with the opening of the Lowell Factories. Country
girls were naturally independent, and the feeling that at this
new work, the few hours they had of everyday leisure
were entirely their own with a satisfaction to them. They
preferred it to going out as hired help. It was
like a young man's pleasure in entering upon business for himself.
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Girls had never tried that experiment before, and they liked it.
It brought out in them a dormant strength of character
which the world did not previously see but now fully acknowledges.
Of course, they had a right to continue at that
freer kind of work as long as they chose, although
their doing so increase the perplexities of the housekeeping problem
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for themselves, Even since many of them were to become
and did become, American house mistresses. It would be a
step towards the settlement of this vexed and vexing question
if girls would decline to classify each other by their occupations,
which among us are usually only temporary and are continually
shifting from one pair of hands to another. Change's of
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fortune come so abruptly that the millionaire's daughter of today
may be glad to earn her living by sewing or
sweeping Tomorrow. It is the first duty of every woman
to recognize a mutual bond of universal womanhood. Let her
ask herself whether she would like to hear herself or
her sister spoken of as a shop girl, or a
factory girl, or a servant girl, if necessity had compelled
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her for a time to be employed in either of
the ways indicated, if she would shrink from it a little,
then she is a little inhuman When she puts her
unknown human sisters, who are so occupied into a class
by themselves, feeling herself to be somewhat their superior, she
is really the superior person who has accepted her work
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and is doing it faithfully. Whatever it is. This designating
others by their casual employments prevents one from making real
distinctions from knowing persons as persons. A false standard is
set up in the minds of those who classify and
of those who are classified. Perhaps it is chiefly the
fault of ladies themselves that the word lady has nearly
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lost its original meaning, a noble one indicating sympathy and service,
bread giver to those who are in need. The idea
that it means something external in dress or circumstances has
been too generally adopted by rich and poor, and this,
coupled with the sweeping notion that in our country one
person is just as good as another, has led to
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ridiculous results like that of saleswomen calling themselves sales ladies.
Have even heard a chambermaid at a hotel introduce herself
to guests as the chamber lady. I did not believe
that any Lowell Miller girl was ever absurd enough to
wish to be known as a factory lady, although most
of them knew that factory girl did not represent a
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high type of womanhood in the old world. But they
themselves belonged to the New world, not to the old,
and they were making their own traditions to hand down
to their Republican descendants, one of which was and is,
that honest work has no need to assert itself or
to humble itself in a nation like ours, but simply
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to take its place as one of the foundation stones
of the republic. The young women who worked at Lowell
had the advantage of living in a community where character
alone commanded respect. They never at their work or away
from it heard themselves contemptuously spoken of on account of
their occupation, except by the ignorant or weak minded, whose
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comments they were of course too sensible to heed. We
may as well acknowledge that one of the unworthy tendencies
of womankind is towards petty estimates of other women. This
classifying habit illustrates the fact, if we must classify our sisters,
let us broaden ourselves by making large classifications. We might
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all place ourselves in one of two ranks, the women
who do something and the women who do nothing, the
first being, of course the only creditable place to occupy.
And if we would escape from our pettinesses, as we
all may and should, the way to do it is
to find the key to other lives and live in
their largeness. By sharing their outlook upon life, even poorer
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people's windows will give us a new horizon, and often
a far broader one than our own. End of Chapter nine,
Mountain Friends,
Chapter nine of A New England Girlhood by Lucy Larcom.
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
visit LibriVox dot org. Read by Dorian Marcott, A New
England Girlhood, Chapter nine, Mountain Friends. The pleasure we found
(00:23):
in making new acquaintances among our workmates arose partly from
their having come from great distances, regions unknown to us,
as the northern districts of Maine and New Hampshire and
Vermont were. In those days of stagecoach traveling, when railroads
had as yet only connected the larger cities with one another,
it seemed wonderful to me to be talking with anybody
(00:43):
who had really seen mountains and lived among them. One
of the younger girls who worked beside me during my
very first days in the mill had come from far
up near the sources of the Merrimac, and she told
me a great deal about her home and about farm
life among the hills. Almost with awe when she said
that she lived in a valley where the sun set
up four o'clock and where the great snowstorms drifted in,
(01:07):
so that sometimes they did not see a neighbor for weeks.
To have mountain summons, looking down upon one out of
the clouds summer and winter, by day and by night
seemed to be something both delightful and terrible. And yet
here was this girl, to whom it all appeared like
the merest commonplace. What she felt about it was that
it was awful cold. Sometimes the days were so short,
(01:30):
and it grew dark so early. Then she told me
about the spinning and the husking and the sugar making,
while we sat in a corner together waiting to replace
the full spools by empty ones, the work usually given
to the little girls. I had a great admiration for
this girl because she had come from those wilderness regions.
The scent of pine woods and checkerberry leaves seemed to
(01:52):
hang about her. I believed I liked her all the
better because she said down and how it was part
of the mountain flavor. I tried, on my part to
impress her with stories of the sea, but I did
not succeed very well. Her principal comment was, they don't
think much of sailor's u by our way. And I
(02:12):
received the impression from her and others, and from my
own imagination that rural life was far more delightful than
the life of towns. But there is something in the
place where we were born that holds us always by
the heart strings. A town that still has a great
deal of the country in it, one that is rich
in beautiful scenery and ancestral associations, is almost like a
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living being with a body and a soul. We speak
of such a town, if our birthplace, as of a mother,
I think of ourselves as their sons and daughters. So
we felt, my sisters and I about our dear native
town of Beverly. It's miles of sea border almost every
sunny cove and rocky headland of which was a part
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of some near relatives homestead were only half a day's
journey distant, and the misty ocean spaces beyond still widening
out on our imagination from the green inland landscape around us.
But the hills sometimes shut us in body and soul.
To those who have been reared by the sea, a
wide horizon is a necessity, both for the mind and
(03:18):
for the eye. We had many opportunities of escape towards
our native shores. For the larger part of our large
family still remained there, and there was a constant coming
and going among us. The stage coach driver looked upon
us as it especial charge, and we had a sense
of personal property. In the Salem and Lowell stage coach,
which had once like a fairy godmother's coach, rumbled down
(03:42):
into our own little lane, taking possession of us, and
carried us off to a new home. My married sisters
had families growing up about them, and they liked to
have us younger ones come and help take care of
their babies. One of them sent for me just when
the close air and long day's work were beginning to
tell upon my health, and it was decided that I
(04:02):
had better go. The salt wind soon restored my strength,
and those months of quiet family life were very good
for me. Like most young girls, I had a motherly
fondness for little children, and my two baby nephews were
my pride and delight. The older one had a delicate constitution,
(04:22):
and there was a thoughtful, questioning look in his eyes
that seemed to gaze forward almost sadly, and foresee that
he should never attain to manhood. The younger, a plump,
vigorous urchin three or four months old, did without doubt
feel his life in every limb. He was my especial
(04:42):
charge for his brother's clinging weakness. Gave him the first born,
the place nearest his mother's heart. The baby bore the
family name mine and his mother's, Our little lark, we
sometimes called him for his wide awakeness and his merry heartedness.
Alas neither of those beautiful boys grew up to be men.
(05:04):
One page of my whole memories is sadly written over
with the elegy the graves of a household, father, mother,
and four sons, an entire family long since passed away
from earthly sight. The tie between my lovely baby nephew
and myself became very close. The first two years of
(05:25):
a child's life are its most appealing years, and call
out all the latent tenderness of the nature on which
it leans for protection. I think I should have missed
out of the best educating influences of my youth if
I had not had the care of that baby for
a year or more, just as I entered my teens,
I was never so happy as when I held him
(05:45):
in my arms, sleeping or waking, and he happy anywhere,
was always contented. When he was with me, I was
as fond as ever of reading, and somehow I managed
to combine baby and book. Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop was
just then coming out in the Philadelphia Weekly paper, and
(06:06):
I read it with the baby playing at my feet
or lying across my lap in an unfinished room given
up to sea chests and coffee bags and spicy foreign odors.
My cherub's papa, with a sea captain, usually away on
his African voyages. Little Nell and her grandfather became as
real to me as my darling charge, and a fittear
(06:28):
from his nurse's eyes sometimes dropped upon his cheek as
he slept. He was not saddened by it. When he awoke,
he was irrepressible, clutching at my hair with his stout
pink fists and driving all dream people effectually out of
my head. Like all babies, he was something of a tyrant.
(06:49):
But that brief sweet despotism ends only too soon. I
put him gratefully down, dimpled, chubby, and imperious upon the
list of my girlhood's teachers. My sister had no domestic
health besides mine, so I learned a good deal about
general housework. A girl's preparation for life was in those
days considered quite imperfect. Who had no practical knowledge of
(07:14):
that kind. We were taught, indeed, how to do everything
that a woman might be called upon to do under
any circumstances, for herself or for the household she lived in.
It was one of the advantages of the old simple
way of living that the young daughters of the house were,
as a matter of course, instructed in all these things.
(07:34):
They acquired the habit of being ready for emergencies, and
the family that required no outside assistance, was delightfully independent.
A young woman would have been considered a very inefficient
being who could not make and mend, and wash and
iron her own clothing, and get three regular meals and
clear them away every day, besides keeping the house tidy
(07:56):
and doing any other needed neighborly service, such as sitting
all night by a sick bed. To be a good
watcher was considered one of the most important of womanly attainments.
People who lived side by side exchanged such services without
waiting to be asked, and they seemed to be happiest
of whom such kindnesses were most expected. Every kind of
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work brings its own compensations and attractions. I really began
to like playing sewing. I enjoyed sitting down for a
whole afternoon of it, fingers flying and thoughts flying faster still,
the motion of the hand seeming to set the mind astir.
Such afternoons used to bring me throngs of poetic suggestions,
(08:38):
particularly if I sat by an open window and could
hear the wind blowing and a burden too singing. Nature
is often very generous in opening her heart to those
who must keep their hands employed. Perhaps it is because
she is always quietly at work herself, and so sympathizes
with her busy human friends. And possibly there was no
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needful ocution patient, which is wholly unbeautiful. The beauty of
work depends upon the way we meet it, whether we
arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy
that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we
open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as
an approaching friend who will keep us delightful company all day,
and who will make us feel at evening that the
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day was well worth its fatigues. I found my practical
experience of housekeeping and baby tending very useful to me
afterwards at the west, and my sister Emily's family when
she was disabled by illness. I think, indeed, that every
item of real knowledge I ever acquired has come into
you somewhere or somehow in the course of the years.
(09:43):
But these were not the things I had most wished
to do. The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me,
a world of which I had already caught large and
tempting glimpses. And I did not like to feel the
horizon shutting me in, even to so pleasant a corner
as this. And the worst of it was that I
was getting too easy and contented, too indifferent to the
(10:05):
higher realities which my work and my thoughtful companions had
kept keenly clear before me. I felt myself slipping into
an inward apathy from which it was hard to rouse myself.
I could not let it go on, so I must
be where my life could expand. It was hard to
leave the dear little fellow I had taught to walk
(10:25):
and to talk, but I knew he would not be inconsolable,
so I only said I must go, and turned my
back upon the sea and my face to the banks
of the Merrimac. When I returned, I found that I
enjoyed even the familiar, unremitting clatter of the mill, because
it indicated that something was going on. I liked to
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feel the people around me, even those whom I did
not know. As a wave may like to feel the
surrounding waves urging it forward with or against its own will.
I felt that I belonged to the world, that there
was something for me to do in it, though I
had not yet found out what something to do. It
might be very little, but still it would be my
(11:09):
own work. And then there was the better, something which
I had almost forgotten to be. Underneath my dull thoughts,
the old aspirations were smoldering, the old ideals rose and
beckoned to me through the rekindling light. It was always aspiration,
rather than ambition, by which I felt myself stirred. I
(11:32):
did not care to outstrip others and become what is
called distinguished without a possibility, so much as I longed
to answer the voice that invited ever receding up to
invisible heights, however unattainable they might seem. I was conscious
of a desire that others should feel something coming to
them out of my life, Like the breath of flowers,
(11:54):
the whisper of the winds, the warmth of the sunshine,
and the depth of the sky that I felt did
not require great gifts or of fine education. We might
all be that to each other, and there was no
opportunity for vanity or pride in receiving a beautiful influence
and giving it out again. I do not suppose that
(12:15):
I definitely thought all this, though I find that the
verses I wrote for our two meal magazines at about
this time often expressed these and similar longings. They were vague,
and they were too likely to dissipate themselves in mere dreams.
But our aspirations come to us from a source far
beyond ourselves. Happy are they who are not disobedient unto
(12:37):
the heavenly vision. A girl of sixteen sees the world
before her through rose tinted mists, a blending of celestial
colors and earthly exhalations, and she cannot separate their elements
if she would, they all belong to the landscape of
her youth. It is a mystery of the meeting horizons,
the visible beauty seeking to lose and find itself in
(13:00):
the invisible. In returning to my daily toil among workmates
from the hill country. The scenery to which they belonged
became also a part of my life. They brought the
mountains with them, a new background and a new hope.
We shared an uneven path and homely occupations. But above
us hung glorious summits, never wholly out of sight. Every
(13:22):
blossom and every dewdrop at our feet was touched with
some tint of that far off splendor, and every pebble
by the wayside was a messenger from the peak that
our feet would stand upon by and by. The true
climber knows the delight of trusting his path, of following
it without seeing a step before him, or a glimpse
of blue sky above him, sometimes only knowing that it
(13:45):
is a right path, because it is the only one,
and because it leads upward. This our daily duty was
to us, so we did not always know it. The
faithful plotter was sure to win the heights. Unconsciously we
learn the lesson that only by a humble doing can
any of us win the lofty possibilities of being. For indeed,
(14:07):
what we all want to find is not so much
our place as our path. The path leads to the
place and the place when we have found it is
only a clearing by the road side and opening into
another path. And no comrades are so dear as those
who have broken with us a pioneer road which it
(14:29):
will be safe and good for others to follow, which
will furnish a plain clue for all bewildered travelers hereafter.
There is no more exhilarating human experience than this, And
perhaps it is the highest angelic one. It may be
that some such mutual work is to link us forever
with one another in the infinite life. The girls who
(14:51):
toiled together at Lowell were clearing away a few weeds
from the overgone track of independent labor for other women.
He practically said, by numbering themselves among factory girls, that
in our country no real odium could be attached to
any honest toil that any self respecting women might undertake.
I regarded as one of the privileges of my youth
(15:12):
that I was permitted to grow up among these active,
interesting girls, whose lives were not mere echoes of other lives,
but had principle and purpose distinctly their own. Their vagar
of character was a natural development the New Hampshire girls
who came to Lowell were descendants of the sturdy backwardsmen
who settled that state scarcely one hundred years before. Their
(15:36):
grandmothers had suffered the hardships of frontier life, had known
the horrors of savage warfare, when the beautiful valleys of
the Connecticut and the Merrimack were threaded with Indian trails
from Canada to the white settlements. Those young women did
justice to their inheritance. They were earnest and capable, ready
to undertake anything that was worth doing. My dreamy, indolate
(15:57):
nature was shamed into activity among them. They gave me
a larger, firmer ideal of womanhood. Often during the many
summers and autumns that of late years, I have spent
among the New Hampshire hills, sometimes far up the mountain sides,
where I could listen to the first song of the
little brooks setting out on their journey to join the
very river that float at my feet when I was
(16:18):
a working girl on its banks the Merrimac, I have
felt as if I could also hear the early music
of my workmates lives, those who were born among these
glorious summits, pure, strong, crystalline natures, carrying down with them
the light of blue skies and the freshness of free
winds to their place of toil, Broadening and strengthening as
(16:42):
they went on. Who can tell how they have refreshed
the world, how beautifully they have blended their being with
the great ocean of results. A brook slipe is like
the life of a maiden. The rivers received their strength
on the rock born rills from the unfailing purity of
the mountain. A girl's place in the world is a
(17:03):
very strong one. It is a pity that she does
not always see it. So it is strongest through her
natural impulse to steady herself by leaning upon the eternal
life the only reality. And a weakness comes also from
her inclination to lean against something, upon an unworthy support
rather than none at all. She often unless her life
(17:26):
get broken into fragments among the flimsy trellises of fashion
and conventionality, when it might be a perfect thing in
the upright beauty of its own contricated freedom. Yet girlhood
seldom appreciates itself. We often hear a girl wishing that
she were a boy. That seems so strange. God made
(17:48):
no mistake in her creation. He sent her into the
world full of power and will to be a helper,
and only he knows how much his world needs help.
She is here to make this great house of humanity
a habitable and a beautiful place without and within, a
true home for every one of his children. It matters
(18:10):
not if she is poor, if she has to toil
for her daily bread, or even if she is surrounded
by coarseness and uncongeniality. Nothing can deprive her of her
natural instinct to help, of her birthright as a helper.
These very hindrances may, with faith and patience, develop in
her a nobler womanhood. No let girls be as thankful
(18:33):
that they are girls as that they are human beings,
for they, also, according to His own loving plans for them,
were created in the image of God. Their real power.
The divine dowry of womanhood is that of receiving and
giving inspiration. In this a girl often surpasses her brother,
and it is for her to hold firmly and faithfully
(18:55):
to her holiest instincts, so that when he lets his
standard droop, she may, through her spiritual strength, be a
standard bearer for him. Courage and self reliance are now
held to be virtues as womanly as they are manly.
For the world has grown wise enough to see that
nothing except a life can really help another life. It
(19:17):
is strange that it should have ever held any other
theory about woman. That was the true use of the
word help that grew up so naturally in the rendering
and receiving a womanly service in the old fashioned New
England household. A girl came into a family as one
of the home group, to share its burdens, to feel
that they were her own. The woman who employed her,
(19:39):
if her nature was at all generous, could not feel
that money alone was an equivalent for a heart service.
She added to it her friendship, her gratitude and esteem.
The domestic problem can never be rightly settled until the
old idea of mutual help is in some way restored.
This is the question for girls of the p present
(20:00):
generation to consider, and she who can bring about a
practical solution of it will win the world's gratitude. We
used sometimes to see it claimed in public prints that
it would be better for all of us mill girls
to be working in families at domestic service than to
be where we were. Perhaps the difficulties of modern housekeepers
(20:20):
did begin with the opening of the Lowell Factories. Country
girls were naturally independent, and the feeling that at this
new work, the few hours they had of everyday leisure
were entirely their own with a satisfaction to them. They
preferred it to going out as hired help. It was
like a young man's pleasure in entering upon business for himself.
(20:41):
Girls had never tried that experiment before, and they liked it.
It brought out in them a dormant strength of character
which the world did not previously see but now fully acknowledges.
Of course, they had a right to continue at that
freer kind of work as long as they chose, although
their doing so increase the perplexities of the housekeeping problem
(21:03):
for themselves, Even since many of them were to become
and did become, American house mistresses. It would be a
step towards the settlement of this vexed and vexing question
if girls would decline to classify each other by their occupations,
which among us are usually only temporary and are continually
shifting from one pair of hands to another. Change's of
(21:26):
fortune come so abruptly that the millionaire's daughter of today
may be glad to earn her living by sewing or
sweeping Tomorrow. It is the first duty of every woman
to recognize a mutual bond of universal womanhood. Let her
ask herself whether she would like to hear herself or
her sister spoken of as a shop girl, or a
factory girl, or a servant girl, if necessity had compelled
(21:49):
her for a time to be employed in either of
the ways indicated, if she would shrink from it a little,
then she is a little inhuman When she puts her
unknown human sisters, who are so occupied into a class
by themselves, feeling herself to be somewhat their superior, she
is really the superior person who has accepted her work
(22:09):
and is doing it faithfully. Whatever it is. This designating
others by their casual employments prevents one from making real
distinctions from knowing persons as persons. A false standard is
set up in the minds of those who classify and
of those who are classified. Perhaps it is chiefly the
fault of ladies themselves that the word lady has nearly
(22:32):
lost its original meaning, a noble one indicating sympathy and service,
bread giver to those who are in need. The idea
that it means something external in dress or circumstances has
been too generally adopted by rich and poor, and this,
coupled with the sweeping notion that in our country one
person is just as good as another, has led to
(22:54):
ridiculous results like that of saleswomen calling themselves sales ladies.
Have even heard a chambermaid at a hotel introduce herself
to guests as the chamber lady. I did not believe
that any Lowell Miller girl was ever absurd enough to
wish to be known as a factory lady, although most
of them knew that factory girl did not represent a
(23:15):
high type of womanhood in the old world. But they
themselves belonged to the New world, not to the old,
and they were making their own traditions to hand down
to their Republican descendants, one of which was and is,
that honest work has no need to assert itself or
to humble itself in a nation like ours, but simply
(23:35):
to take its place as one of the foundation stones
of the republic. The young women who worked at Lowell
had the advantage of living in a community where character
alone commanded respect. They never at their work or away
from it heard themselves contemptuously spoken of on account of
their occupation, except by the ignorant or weak minded, whose
(23:57):
comments they were of course too sensible to heed. We
may as well acknowledge that one of the unworthy tendencies
of womankind is towards petty estimates of other women. This
classifying habit illustrates the fact, if we must classify our sisters,
let us broaden ourselves by making large classifications. We might
(24:18):
all place ourselves in one of two ranks, the women
who do something and the women who do nothing, the
first being, of course the only creditable place to occupy.
And if we would escape from our pettinesses, as we
all may and should, the way to do it is
to find the key to other lives and live in
their largeness. By sharing their outlook upon life, even poorer
(24:41):
people's windows will give us a new horizon, and often
a far broader one than our own. End of Chapter nine,
Mountain Friends,
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