s installed in a small room with the
middle-aged woman from Batavia and a second unknown roommate.

Now what, I asked myself, is the mill's attraction and what is the power
of this small town? Its population is 3,346. Of these, 1,000 work in the
knitting-mill, 200 more in a cutlery factory and 300 in various flour,
butter, barrel, planing mills and salt blocks. Half the inhabitants are
young hands. Not one in a hundred has a home in Perry; they have come
from all western parts of the State to work. There are scarcely any
children, few married couples and almost no old people. It is a town of
youthful contemporaries, stung with the American's ambition for
independence and adventure, charmed by the gaiety of being boys and
girls together, with an ever possible touch of romance which makes the
hardest work seem easy. Within the four board walls of each house, whose
type is repeated up and down Perry streets, there is a group of factory
employees boarding and working at the mill. Their names suggest a
foreign parentage, but for several generations they have mingled their
diverse energies in a common effort which makes Americans of them.

As I lived for several weeks among a group of this kind, who were
fairly representative, I shall try to give, through a description of
their life and conversation, their personalities and characteristics,
their occupations out of working hours, a general idea of these unknown
toilers, who are so amazingly like their more fortunate sisters that I
became convinced the difference is only superficial--not one of kind but
merely of variety. The Perry factory girl is separated from the New York
society girl, not by a few generations, but by a few years of culture
and training. In America, where tradition and family play an unimportant
part, the great educator is the spending of money. It is through the
purchase of possessions that the Americans develop their taste, declare
themselves, and show their inherent capacity for culture. Give to the
Perry mill-hands a free chance for growth, transplant them, care for
them, and they will readily show how slight and how merely a thing of
culture the difference is between the wild rose and the American beauty.

What were my first impressions of the hands who returned at noon under
the roof which had extended unquestioning its hospitality? Were they a
band of slaves, victims to toil and deprivation? Were they making the
pitiful exchange of their total vital