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THE BURNING OF THE PEMBERTON MILLS.--THE STORY OF "THE TENTH OF
JANUARY."--WHITTIER AND HIGGINSON.--THE WRITING AND PUBLICATION OF
"THE GATES AJAR."

The town of Lawrence was three miles and a half from Andover. Up to
the year 1860 we had considered Lawrence chiefly in the light of a
place to drive to. To the girlish resources which could, in those
days, only include a trip to Boston at the call of some fate too vast
to be expected more than two or three times a year, Lawrence offered
consolations in the shape of dry goods and restaurant ice-cream, and
a slow, delicious drive in the family carryall through sand flats and
pine woods, and past the largest bed of the sweetest violets that
ever dared the blasts of a New England spring. To the pages of the
gazetteer Lawrence would have been known as a manufacturing town
of importance. Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills were
sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see
the "hands" pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a
patient, throng; used, in those days, to standing eleven hours and a
quarter--women and girls--at their looms, six days of the week, and
making no audible complaints; for socialism had not reached Lawrence,
and anarchy was content to bray in distant parts of the geography at
which the factory people had not arrived when they left school.

Sometimes we counted the great mills as we drove up Essex
Street--having come over the bridge by the roaring dam that tamed
the proud Merrimac to spinning cotton--Pacific, Atlantic, Washington,
Pemberton; but this was an idle, aesthetic pleasure. We did not think
about the mill-people; they seemed as far from us as the coal-miners
of a vague West, or the down-gatherers on the crags of shores whose
names we did not think it worth while to remember. One January
evening, we were forced to think about the mills with curdling horror
that no one living in that locality when the tragedy happened will
forget.

At five o'clock the Pemberton Mills, all hands being at the time on
duty, without a tremor of warning, sank to the ground.

At the erection of the factory a pillar with a defective core had
passed careless inspectors. In technical language, the core had
"floated" an eighth of an inch from its position. The weak spot in the
too thin wall of the pillar had bided its time, and yielded. The roof,
the walls, the machinery, fell upon seven hundred and fifty living
men and wom