re in pantomime, which we children watched with wide-eyed terror
and amusement. For there was some comedy mixed with what had been so
nearly a tragedy, and Jack made us see the very whites of the black
cook's eyes, who, favored by his color, had hidden himself--all except
that dilated whiteness--between two great casks in the bold. Jack
himself had fallen through a trap-door, was badly hurt, and could not
extricate himself.

It was very ludicrous. Jack crept under the table to show us how he and
the cook made eyes at each other down there in the darkness, not daring
to speak. The pantomime was necessary, for the Genoese had very little
English at his command.

When the pirate crew were brought into Salem for trial, my brother had
the questionable satisfaction of identifying in the court-room the
ruffian of a boatswain who had threatened his life. This boatswain and
several others of the crew were executed in Boston. The boy found his
brief sailor-experience quite enough for him, and afterward settled
down quietly to the trade of a carpenter.

Changes thickened in the air around us. Not the least among them was
the burning of "our meeting-house," in which we had all been baptized.
One Sunday morning we children were told, when we woke, that we could
not go to meeting that day, because the church was a heap of smoking
ruins. It seemed to me almost like the end of the world.

During my father's life, a few years before my birth, his thoughts had
been turned towards the new manufacturing town growing up on the banks
of the Merrimack. He had once taken a journey there, with the
possibility in his mind of making the place his home, his limited
income furnishing no adequate promise of a maintenance for his large
family of daughters. From the beginning, Lowell had a high reputation
for good order, morality, piety, and all that was dear to the
old-fashioned New Englander's heart.

After his death, my mother's thoughts naturally followed the direction
his had taken; and seeing no other opening for herself, she sold her
small estate, and moved to Lowell, with the intention of taking a
corporation-house for mill-girl boarders. Some of the family objected,
for the Old World traditions about factory life were anything but
attractive; and they were current in New England until the experiment
at Lowell had shown that independent and intelligent workers invariably
give their own character to their occupation. My mother had visited