be
known as a brick shanty.) "A gyrl can bo'd thar for $2.25 a week. You
won't make that at first."

With extreme kindness he leads me into the roaring mill past picturesque
black men and cotton bales: we reach the "weave-room." I am told that
carpet factories are celebrated for their uproar, but the weave-looms of
a cotton mill to those who know them need no description! This is chaos
before order was conceived: more weird in that, despite the din and
thunder, everything is so orderly, so perfectly carried forth by the
machinery. Here the cotton cloth is woven. Excelsior is so vast that
from one end to the other of a room one cannot distinguish a friend. I
decide instantly that the weave-room shall not be my destination! An
overseer comes up to me. He talks with me politely and kindly--that is,
as well as he can, he talks! It is almost impossible to hear what he
says. He asks me simple and few questions and engages me promptly to
work that "_evening_" as the Southerner calls the hours after midday.

"You can see all the work and choose a sitting or a standing job." This
is an improvement on Pittsburg and Lynn.

I have been told there is always work in the mills for the worker.

It is not strange that every inducement consistent with corporation
rules should be made to entice the labouring girl! The difficulty is
that no effort is made to keep her! The ease with which, in all these
experiences, work has been obtained, goes definitely to prove that there
is a demand everywhere for labourers.

_Organize labour, therefore, so well that the work-woman who obtains her
task may be able to continue it and keep her health and her
self-respect_.

With Excelsior as my future workshop I leave the mill to seek lodging in
the mill village.

The houses built by the corporation for the hands are some five or six
minutes' walk, not more, from the palace-like structure of the mill
proper. To reach them I plod through a roadway ankle-deep in red clay
dust. The sun is bright and the air heavy, lifeless and dull; the scene
before me is desolate, meager and poverty-stricken in the extreme.

The mill houses are all built exactly alike. Painted in sickly greens
and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil.
Here the architect has catered to the different families, different
individual tastes in one point of view alone, regarding the number of
rooms: They are known as "four-or six-room cottages." In one of th