if not most, of the workers,
an ordeal of half an hour's journey in the Subways or "L," shoving,
pushing, jamming, running to catch the shuttle; shoving, pushing,
jamming, running for the East Side Subway; shoving, pushing, jamming,
scurrying along hard pavements to the factory door; and at the end of
a day of eight or nine hours' work, all that to be done over again to
get home.

Instead, at the Falls, it meant a five minutes' leisurely--unless one
overslept--walk under old shade trees, through the glen along a path
lined with jack-in-the-pulpits, wild violets, moss--the same five
minutes' walk home at noon to a hot lunch, plenty of time in which to
eat it, a bit of visiting on the way back to the factory, and a
leisurely five minutes' walk home in the late afternoon. No one has
measured yet what crowded transportation takes out of a body in the
cities.

New York factories are used to new girls--they appear almost daily in
such jobs as I have worked in. At the Falls a strange person in town
is excitement enough, a strange girl at the bleachery practically an
unheard-of thing. New girls appear now and then to take the places of
those who get married or the old women who must some time or other
die. But not strange girls. Everyone in the bleachery grew up with
everyone else; as Ella Jane said, you know their mothers and their
grandmothers, too.

It so happened that a cataclysmic event had visited the Falls the week
before my appearance. A family had moved away, thereby detaching a
worker from the bleachery--the girl who ticketed pillow cases. The
Sunday I appeared in town, incidentally, seven babies were born. That
event--or those events--plus me, minus the family who moved away and
an old man who had died the week before, made the population of the
Falls 4,202. Roughly, half that number either worked at the bleachery
or depended on those who worked there. Who or what the other half
were, outside the little group of Main Street tradespeople, remained a
mystery. Of course, there were the ministers of the gospel and their
families--in the same generous overdose--apportioned to most small
towns. The actual number working in the bleachery was about six
hundred and twenty men and women.

Odd, the different lights in which you can see a small town. The
chances are that, instead of being a worker, I might have spent the
week end visiting some of the "_elite_" of the Falls. In that case we
should have motored sooner or la