charm.

Letty leaned her head against Molly's breast and smiled contentedly,
whilst the mill-girl rocked softly to and fro.

"Shall Molly sing By-O?"

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.

Jones is a courteous host. His lodgers occupy the comfortable seats,
whilst he perches himself on the edge of a straight high-backed chair
and converses with us, not lighting his pipe until urged, then
deprecatingly smoking in little smothered puffs. I feel convinced that
Jones thinks that Massachusetts shoe-hands are a grade higher in the
social scale than South Carolina mill-girls! Because, after being
witness more than once to my morning and evening ablutions on the back
steps, he said:

"Now, I am goin' to dew the right thing by you-all; I'm goin' to fix up
a wash-stand in that there loft." This is a triumph over the lax,
uncleanly shiftlessness of the Southern settlement. Again:

"You-all must of had good food whar you come from: your skin shows it;
'tain't much like hyar-'bouts. Why, I'd know a mill-hand anywhere, if I
met her at the North Pole--salla, pale, sickly."

I might have added for him, deathlike, ... skeleton ... _doomed_. But I
listen, rocking in the best chair, whilst Mrs. White glides in from the
kitchen and, unobserved, takes