he coveted work. For the feeling had
already frequently come to me, that I was the one too many in the
overcrowded family nest. Once, before we left our old home, I had heard
a neighbor condoling with my mother because there were so many of us,
and her emphatic reply had been a great relief to my mind:--

"There is isn't one more than I want. I could not spare a single one of
my children."

But her difficulties were increasing, and I thought it would be a
pleasure to feel that I was not a trouble or burden or expense to
anybody. So I went to my first day's work in the mill with a light
heart. The novelty of it made it seem easy, and it really was not hard,
just to change the bobbins on the spinning-frames every three quarters
of an hour or so, with half a dozen other little girls who were doing
the same thing. When I came back at night, the family began to pity me
for my long, tiresome day's work, but I laughed and said,--

"Why, it is nothing but fun. It is just like play."

And for a little while it was only a new amusement; I liked it better
than going to school and "making believe" I was learning when I was
not. And there was a great deal of play mixed with it. We were not
occupied more than half the time. The intervals were spent frolicking
around around the spinning-frames, teasing and talking to the older
girls, or entertaining ourselves with the games and stories in a
corner, or exploring with the overseer's permission, the mysteries of
the the carding-room, the dressing-room and the weaving-room.

I never cared much for machinery. The buzzing and hissing and whizzing
of pulleys and rollers and spindles and flyers around me often grew
tiresome. I could not see into their complications, or feel interested
in them. But in a room below us we were sometimes allowed to peer in
through a sort of blind door at the great water-wheel that carried the
works of the whole mill. It was so huge that we could only watch a few
of its spokes at a time, and part of its dripping rim, moving with a
slow, measured strength through the darkness that shut it in. It
impressed me with something of the awe which comes to us in thinking of
the great Power which keeps the mechanism of the universe in motion.
Even now, the remembrance of its large, mysterious movement, in which
every little motion of every noisy little wheel was involved, brings
back to me a verse from one of my favorite hymns:--

"Our lives through various scenes a