"Ida was dun fer, I can tell ye; she suttenly was. She can't git back to work fer days."
The spinning-room is the toughest room in the mill.
After supper the men went out on the porch with their pipes and we to the sitting-room, where Molly, the story-teller, seated herself in a comfortable chair, her feet outstretched before her. She made a lap, a generous lap, to which she tried to beguile the baby, Letty. Mrs. White had disappeared.
"You-all come here to me, Letty." She held out her large dirty hands to the blue-eyed waif. In its blue-checked apron, the remains of fish and ham around its mouth, its large blue eyes wandering from face to face in search of the pale mother who had for a time left her, Letty stood for a moment motionless and on the verge of tears.
There was some magic in that word that at long past eight charmed the eighteen-months'-old baby. She toddled across the floor to the mill-girl, who lifted her tenderly into her ample lap. The big, awkward girl, scarcely more than a child herself, uncouth, untutored, suddenly gained a dignity and a grace maternal--not too much to say it, she had charm.
Letty leaned her head against Molly's breast and smiled contentedly, whilst the mill-girl rocked softly to and fro.
She should. The little face, lifted, declared its request.
"Letty must sing, too," murmured the young girl. "Sing By-O! We'll all sing it together."
Letty covered her eyes with one hand-to feign sleep and sang her two words sweetly, "By-O! By-O!" and Molly joined her. Thus they rocked and hummed, a picture infinitely touching to see.
One of these two would soon be an unclaimed foundling when the unknown woman had faded out of existence. The other--who can say how to her maternity would come!
In the room where we sit Jones' wife died a few weeks before, victim to pneumonia that all winter has scourged the town--"the ketchin' kind"--that is the way it has been caught, and fatally by many.[6]
[Footnote 6: There are no statistics, they tell me, kept of births, marriages or deaths in this State; it is less surprising that the mill village has none.]
In one corner stands a sewing machine, in another an organ--luxuries: in these cases, objects of art. They are bought on the installment plan, and some of these girls pay as high as $100 for the organ in monthly payments of $4 at a time. The mill-girl is too busy to use the machine and too ignorant to play the organ.