ile, receiving additions
from each tenement as we pass.

Beside me walks a boy of fourteen in brown earth-coloured clothes. He is
so thin that his bones threaten to pierce his vestments. He has a
slender visage of the frailness I have learned to know and distinguish:
it represents the pure American type of people known as "poor white
trash," and with whose blood has been scarcely any admixture of foreign
element. A painter would call his fine, sensitive face beautiful: it is
the face of a martyr. His hat of brown felt slouches over bright red
hair; one cuffless hand, lank and long, hangs down inert, the other
sleeve falls loose; he is one-armed. His attitude and gait express his
defrauded existence. Cotton clings to his clothes; his shoes, nearly
falling off his feet, are red with clay stains. I greet him; he is shy
and surprised, but returns the salutation and keeps step with me. He is
"from the hills," an orphan, perfectly friendless. He boards with a lot
of men; evidently their companionship has not been any solace to him,
for, as he is alone this day, I see him always alone.

He works from 5:45 to 6:45, with three-quarters of an hour at noon, and
has his Saturday afternoons and his Sundays free. He is destitute of the
quality we call joy and has never known comfort. He makes fifty cents a
day; he has no education, no way of getting an education; he is almost
a man, crippled and condemned. At my exclamation when he tells me the
sum of his wages he looks up at me; a faint likeness to a smile comes
about his thin lips: "_It keeps me in existence_!" he says in a slow
drawl. He used just those words.

At the different doors of the mill we part. He is not unconscious of my
fellowship with him, that I feel and know. A kindling light has come
across his face. "Good luck to you!" I bid him, and he lifts his head
and his bowed shoulders and with something like warmth replies, "I hope
you-all will have good luck, tew."

As we come into the spooling-room from the hot air without the mill
seems cold. I go over to a green box destined for the refuse of the
floors and sit down, waiting for work. On this day I am to have my own
"side"--I am a full-fledged spooler. Excelsior has gotten us all out of
our beds before actual daylight, but that does not mean we are to have a
chance to begin our money-making piece-work job at once! "Thar ain't
likely to be no yarn for an hour to-day," Maggie tells me. She is no
less dirty than yester