for
themselves and their families.

There is a lower class of workers who find employment in the
spinning-mills and power-loom factories that abound among us, and these
number not less than two thousand. They are the children of weavers who
came from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany. They have been
brought up from childhood to fill the bobbin or attend the spindle or
the loom, and are therefore skilled hands, young as many of them are. I
have known more than one affecting instance of aged parents having been
comfortably maintained by daughters belonging to this class.

It has been one of the plumes in the cap of New England factory-girls,
that they kept themselves genteel on factory-wages, educated their
brothers, supported their parents, and yet had something over when they
came to be married. I never could understand how such financial marvels
could be accomplished on the wages of a mill-girl. But I have seen great
things in the same line done among the untidy girls of foreign parentage
who work in the cotton and woollen factories of our city. These,
however, have toiled on silently and in obscurity, with no poet to
celebrate their doings, no newspaper to sound their praises, no magazine
to trumpet forth their devotion, their virtue, or even their beauty.

I cannot give, with either fulness or accuracy, the industrial
statistics of a city like this; nor would I volunteer thus to increase
the dulness of my narrative, if it were in my power to do so. But it
will be seen, that, wherever a door stands open into which woman may
enter and obtain the privilege to toil, she is sure to ask for
admission. Wages are always a consideration, but employment of some
kind, whether remunerative or not, is a greater one. Of the thousands
thus toiling at all kinds of labor, some descriptions of which are
necessarily unhealthy, there are many whose once robust frames have
become attenuated and weary unto wearing out, whose midnight couch,
instead of being one of repose, is racked with cough and restlessness
and pain. The once brilliant eyes have lost their lustre, the once rosy
cheeks their fresh and glowing bloom. The young girl fades under
unnatural labor protracted far into the night. If she should fail to
toil thus, some infirm parent would go without food. The sick widow,
older in years, and farther travelled round the long circuit of human
sorrow, dares not indulge in the rest that is necessary even to life,
lest hungry