Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

SALOME SHEPARD, REFORMER.

BY

HELEN M. WINSLOW.

BOSTON, MASS.:

Arena Publishing Company,

COPLEY SQUARE,

1893.

Copyright 1893,

BY

HELEN M. WINSLOW.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ARENA PRESS.

“Pardon, gentles all,

The flat, unraised spirit that hath dared

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object.”

Shakespeare.

SALOME SHEPARD, REFORMER.

I.

Salome Shepard gazed wonderingly at the crowd of people in the street, as she guided her pony-phaeton through the factory precincts.

“What can be the matter with these people?” she thought. “I’m sure they ought to have gone to their work before this.”

It was a wet October day. The narrow street was slippery with the muddy water that oozed along to the gutters. The factory boardinghouses loomed up on either side, dingy and desolate. Even the mills looked larger and coarser, in the gloomy air of the morning.

As she drove by them, the fair owner listened in vain for the rumble of machinery. Inside, the great, well-lighted rooms looked dreary and barn-like in the gray mist that struggled through the windows.

One hour before, the machinery, shrieking and groaning, had voiced the protest of the “hands” against their fancied and their real wrongs. One hour before, every employe had been in his or her place. But the gloom of the atmosphere could not obscure the suppressed excitement of the morning. Shortsighted and blind to their best interest, they might have been; but there was not a man among them who did not feel a tremendous underlying principle at stake.

And so, at precisely ten o’clock, the machinery had suddenly and mysteriously stopped, and every man, woman and child, without a word, had left the mills.

All this had happened while Salome Shepard was calling on an elderly friend of her mother’s at the other end of the town. It had been a delightfully cosy morning in spite of the rain; and, after a gossipy fashion, they had passed it in discussing, as women will, the newest pattern of crochet, the last society-novel, the coming concerts in town.

Salome’s mood was the comfortable one conduced by such soothing intellectual food, as she set forth on her homeward drive. The rain had ceased, and only along the river did the mists hover, suggesting to her idle fancy the thick smoke which hangs over a smouldering fire.

But the fire which had been creeping under the life of the Shawsheen Mills had but just burst into flames, which mounted higher and higher as the day wore on.

All through the factory precincts the unwonted excitement was manifest. Groups of employes were everywhere—on the street-corners, in front of tenements and boardinghouses, in the middle of the street;—and all were engaged in absorbing discussion of one exciting theme—the strike.

Men without coats or hats; women with shawls thrown loosely over their heads; girls, bonnetless and neglectful of dress; unkempt old women, who were perhaps the home-makers for these hard-worked and ill-paid people; all were indifferent save to one subject.

Even the quick passage, through their midst, of the pony-phaeton and its mistress failed to attract attention beyond an occasional surly glance from the men or an envious one from the women. Unmindful of the long days in store, when there would be ample time to discuss their wrongs, they remained huddled in excited groups in the wet October air, talking over the strike,—the famous strike of the Shawsheen Mills.

“I declare!” muttered the young woman who was hurrying the pony out of these disagreeable surroundings; “it must be a strike! Nothing else would crowd them into the street so. I wonder what they want? Dear me! what nuisances these work-people are. Why can’t they be sensible, and when they are earning a living, be content? Dear me! if I had the making over of this world I would make everybody comfortably off, and nobody rich—unless it were myself,” she added, laughing; for absolute truthfulness was a necessity of Salome Shepard’s nature, and she knew perfectly well that she could not do without the luxuries to which she had always been accustomed.

“If I had the making over of the world!”

The words repeated themselves in her mind. If any human being has the power of making over the world in any smallest degree, something whispered, that person must be a young, attractive woman, with a vast property and absolute control of several hundred people, besides two millions of dollars in her own right.

“Dear me!” she said aloud, as she drove up the graveled road under the dripping yellow beeches. “How positively dreadful it must be to be a reformer! How would I look in a bloomer costume and black bombazine bonnet? No. Let things alone, keep to your sphere, young woman,—the proper, well-regulated, protected and chaperoned sphere of a delicate young lady, and let the world right its own wrongs.”

She jumped lightly from the phaeton, tossing the reins to James, and showing her fine, well-turned figure to excellent advantage as she ran up the broad steps.

The massive doors turned noiselessly at her approach. She passed through the fine old hall and went directly up the broad oak staircase to her room.

“How comfortable this is,” she said to herself, as the blazing wood-fire threw flickering shadows over the dainty hangings, the warm rugs and the choice pictures.

But even as she drew a long sigh of contentment with her lot, a picture of wet and muddy streets, thickset with groups of brawny men and bedraggled, unkempt women, intruded itself, and the sigh changed its tenor.

“If I only had the making over of the world!” she said again aloud; and added resolutely, “but I haven’t.”

II.

The Shawsheen Mills had been established many years before the opening of this story by Salome’s grandfather, Newbern Shepard. They constituted one of the chief manufacturing concerns of Shepardtown. They made more cloth, and that of a better quality, than any other mill outside the “City of Spindles.” They employed a much larger force of operatives than any other factory in the place, and had always held a controlling interest in town affairs.

When the Shawsheen Mills were first started, blooming girls from all parts of Massachusetts came swarming to them, glad of a new and respectable employment,—came with earnest purpose to make this new life and its outcomes subservient to a better future. The conscientious New England girl of those days took as much pride in making a perfect web of cloth as though it were for her own wearing. Aware that her employers took an interest in her welfare, aside from the fact that she was a part of the motive power of the mill, she rewarded them with a full performance of her duty. A mutual goodfellowship had existed, then, between employer and employed in the years when old Newbern Shepard was at the head of his mills.

All this had changed. Newbern Shepard had died after a long and successful career, leaving the business to his son, Floyd Shepard. The latter, educated at Harvard, with five years of study afterward in Germany, had developed little taste for an active business life such as his father had led. He had, consequently, placed the entire business in the hands of Otis Greenough, a friend of his college-days and a hard-headed business man. Floyd Shepard had idled the greater part of his time before reaching the age of fifty in various parts of the world.

Then he came home, married a Baltimore belle, and passed his old age in his native place.

Even then, he gave little thought to the details of business. He added to and improved the home of his forefathers, until his house and grounds were acknowledged to be the finest in the state. After four years of married life, his young wife died, leaving him one child—a babe of three days. Then he retired into his study, and lived only among his books.

“Don’t trouble me with the business,” he would say to Otis Greenough, on the rare occasions when it seemed necessary to consult the owner of the mills. “I care nothing as to how you manage the works, and know less how it should be done. Suit yourself as to details, and keep the mills paying a good profit. I shall be satisfied.”

Upon this principle the mills had been run for thirty years. The agent and his superintendents had devoted themselves to the problem of getting out more goods and making more money than their competitors, while keeping the standard of their wares up to its old mark. They had no time for the problem of human life involved. The first and principal question had required a severe struggle, with active brains and sharp wits. What wonder, then, that the increasing mass of operatives had come to be considered, every year, less as human beings in need of help and encouragement, and more as mechanical attachments of the mills?

Only such operatives as had been brought up in the mills realized the difference. The employes were mostly of the unwashed population, expecting nothing but a place to earn their living and but scanty pay for it.

Having, at the outset, no confidence in their employers, and no feeling of goodwill towards them, they had no conscientious motive behind their work. On the contrary, they stood on the defensive, watching for oppression and tyranny, and ready to take arms against them.

This was the state of things when the first regularly organized strike occurred at the Shawsheen Mills.

Otis Greenough, although an old man, was still at the head of the mills. Floyd Shepard’s death three years before had made no difference with the vast business interests in his name. In willing everything he owned to his daughter, who was already heiress to a large fortune from her mother’s family, he had provided that Otis Greenough should be chief agent during the remainder of his life; and that the mills should continue on the same plan by which they had been run for the past quarter of a century.

Otis Greenough was an arbitrary man, with that enormous strength of will which a man must have who is to control and manage two thousand people and an increasing business.

If, in the march of economic progress, he chose to make changes in the machinery of the mills, he consulted no one, and cared nothing for the black looks or surly mutterings of the operative who might fancy himself injured thereby. Had it been hinted to him that his operatives might be trained to take a personal interest in the success or failure of new experiments or, indeed, that they had any right to his brotherly consideration, he would have flouted the idea.

It was his boast that he never wasted words on the operatives. In short, he was as indifferent to the rights of Labor as his Lancashire spinners were to the interests of Capital. Hence the strike.

At noon of the day that Salome Shepard had driven through the factory street, Otis Greenough sat in his private office with his two superintendents, the treasurer and cashier of the mills, and one or two subordinates. As the bell struck for twelve, five men from the various departments filed in and presented a written document. They were the committee appointed by the new Labor Union.

Mr. Greenough took the paper with an air that showed him to be in anything but a conciliatory mood. Without opening it, he burst forth angrily:

“What, in the name of common sense, is this farce anyhow? What do you mean by leaving your work and presuming to come here, dictating terms to me?”

“The paper will explain everything, sir,” replied the foremost of the committee. “We have our rights—or should have them. The time has come when we propose to get them. Will you read the petition, sir?”

“No,” thundered the choleric old man. “Not in your presence. Villard, treat with them.” Mr. Greenough was too angry to say more.

Mr. Villard, the younger superintendent, stepped forward.

“I think,” he said, “that you had better leave us for a time. We shall need to consider your proposals, whatever they may be. Go now, and come again later—say at four o’clock.” Agreeing to this proposition, the five men turned and left the office. Mr. Villard sat down again, waiting for the agent to speak.

“The confounded whelps!” ejaculated Mr. Greenough, as soon as he could find breath. “Open that paper, Villard—the impudent puppies!”

Without answering, John Villard tore open the envelope, and read the document aloud:

Whereas, we, the undersigned, believing that our interests demand an organization which shall promote and protect affairs relating to us as laboring men; and

Whereas, we have already organized and maintained such a society; it is now unanimously agreed that we insist upon the recognition of such a body by our employers, and upon their making certain concessions for the benefit of that body.

Whereas, there is a ten-hour system established in this state by law; we hereby resolve that we will refuse to work ten and a half or eleven hours a day as has been demanded of us.

Whereas, we believe the introduction of the new frames are detrimental to the interests of the mule-spinners; we resolve that they must be taken out, and the old mules replaced, with a written agreement that no more of the obnoxious machinery shall be added for, at least, five years.

Whereas, there has been an attempt made to reduce our wages, especially in the weaving department; we hereby resolve that we will submit to no curtailment of wages, and to demand payment of all wages weekly, as is the custom in certain other mills in this state.

Trusting that these our petitions may be granted, our rights respected, and that harmonious relations will soon be established between us, we take pleasure in signing ourselves

“Members of the Shawsheen Labor Union.”

Before John Villard had finished reading the paper, Mr. Greenough had risen and was pacing the floor excitedly.

“Shocking!” he exclaimed, as Mr. Villard folded the paper and returned it to its envelope. “Preposterous! Do they think they can impose upon me with such a jumble of unreasoning nonsense as that? Labor Union, indeed! Why, the rascals act as if there were no interests but those of labor. And a beautiful time they’ve taken to strike—when orders are pouring in faster than we can possibly keep up with them. A fine time, indeed!”

“I suppose,” said John Villard, fearlessly, “there seems a slight injustice to them, in cutting down their wages at such a time.”

“What right have they to dictate, I should like to inquire?” answered the irate agent. “If they were not a bigoted, unreasoning set, they’d know they never can serve the interests of labor in such a way. They’d realize that they are only biting off their own noses! They have probably been worked upon by some crank of an agitator. If they were not ignorant dogs, they’d know that they could best serve the interests of labor by being faithful to those of capital. Why,” he concluded, his face growing redder in his wrath, “is this America? Is this our boasted New England? Is this a free country? By Jove! I’ve heard of this sort of thing in England, but in this republican land, this boasted region of freedom—Great Scott! What are we coming to?”

“It’s this accursed trades-unionism creeping in among us,” put in the treasurer’s mild voice, as Otis Greenough paused for breath. “I’ve been expecting it.”

“Blast it, why didn’t you mention it then?” returned Mr. Greenough. But the treasurer retired in confusion behind his books and did not answer.

“Well, Villard,” continued the agent, “I hope now you will give up the Utopian schemes you’ve been nursing for the elevation of the laboring classes. You see just what a foolish, unthinking, unreliable set of men we have to deal with.”

“On the contrary, sir,” returned the second superintendent, firmly, “I sympathize, to a degree, with them. I agree that they have taken an inopportune time to enforce their views, and regret that they could not have seen fit to keep at work while their petition was being considered; and I would advise——”

“I want no man’s advice until I ask it,” interrupted the elder man. “This is our first strike, and it shall be the last so long as I have authority here. Humph! They think they can intimidate me! They have chosen this time because they think I must yield now. They little know me. Otis Greenough has not run the Shawsheen Mills successfully thirty years, to be brow-beaten and conquered in the end by a pack of ignorant laborers.”

“But how is this to end?” asked the first superintendent, speaking for the first time.

“It can end whenever these men will take back their impudent paper and go to work. Villard, when they show up again—four o’clock did you say?—you will tell them so. Offer them a chance to go to work to-morrow morning on the old terms. You needn’t give in to them one inch. Do you hear? Not a jot or tittle.”

“And what if they do not accept?” asked Villard.

“Why, advertise. Advertise far and near. Get new help. We’ll open the mills and run them, too, right in their very teeth. I’ll show them that he who has been master here for thirty years is master until he dies.”

III.

The choleric agent’s blood was fairly up, and he now set himself to plan for the coming warfare. When the committee from the labor union made its appearance at four o’clock, the agent refused to treat directly with them. He retired to his inner office, whence issued a moment later an “open letter to the employes of the Shawsheen Mills.” The circular was composed and written entirely by himself, and was quite characteristic of his high-handed authority. It stated that “as the control of an owner over his property was guaranteed by the law of the land, and was of such unquestionable character as ought not to be meddled with by any other individual or combination of individuals, the agent of the Shawsheen Mills, acting for their owner, would brook no such interference as had been attempted.” But, in bombastic language, he went on to say that, on account of the pressure of work, he offered to take back into the mills such operatives as, after a day’s idleness and a night’s calm reflection, might decide to come back peacefully, and accept the old conditions. The circular closed by adding that all returning operatives must renounce their connection with the new Labor Union, and stating that the Shawsheen Mills would be immediately re-opened.

This letter, as might have been expected, only served to fan the smouldering embers of discord. It was taken at once to the quarters of the new Union, and angrily discussed. A stormy meeting was held that evening, and scores of new members were added to the organization, all unanimously agreeing, not only to keep away from the mills themselves, but to prevent other operatives from entering them. The trouble which might have been met at the outset and subdued by candid discussion and a fair acknowledgment on each side of the claims of the other, was changed into a barricade of danger between labor and capital over which a battle was to be fought, involving money and credit and losses on one side, and daily bread for two thousand people on the other.

“Come,” said Otis Greenough, emerging from his “den” after the committee had left the office. “I want you, Villard, and you, too, Burnham,” he added, turning to the other superintendent, “to go with me this evening, to the owner of these mills, and lay before her the proceedings of the day, and our reasons for taking a firm stand. Although, precious little difference it will make with her, I imagine, how many strikes we have, until her income is affected! Will you be so good as to state, Villard, what you are smiling at.”

“I was thinking, sir, that it is a queer state of affairs, when a person owning large and influential mills like these, need not know of the strike or be consulted with regard to it, until it is half over,” answered Villard. He had no fear of the agent, with whom he was a favorite, in spite of his seeming harshness. “It seems to me, if I were a young woman, with unlimited leisure and wealth, I should care to know something of so tremendous an interest as the Shawsheen Mills represent—that is, if I owned them.”

“Ha, ha!” laughed the agent, “that shows how much of a ladies’ man you are, John. Much you know about the things that interest and amuse the young ladies. By Jove! I should laugh to see the daughter of Floyd Shepard meddling with the details of the great business he left her. She could discuss French and Italian literature, or the different schools of music and art, by the hour, and fairly inundate you with a flood of learning; but when it comes to mills—why, she don’t know a loom from a spinning-jenny—and don’t want to. I’m only going up there as a matter of form. As for advice, she knows I wouldn’t take it, even if she has any to offer. But courtesy—proper courtesy,” and Otis Greenough drew himself up to his fullest height, “and the respect we owe her as the owner of this property, demand that we go there this evening. I will call for you in my carriage at half-past seven.”

And, so saying, he left the office.

“I reckon the old man is about right,” said Burnham, when they were alone. “Miss Shepard knows no more about the practical affairs of her mill, than that little white kitten over there does. She’ll meet us with a listless, half-bored air, pretending to listen to the statements of our chief, and all the time be wishing us at the antipodes.”

“Do you know,” interrupted John Villard, locking the door to the office as they left it together, “I’ve very little patience with women of that sort. Think, with her youth and health and money, what a directing, reforming force in bringing together the conflicting interests of labor and capital she might be! Great Heavens! I wish I had her opportunity. I’d make something of it.”

“Oh, you are too Utopian,” replied Burnham. “It is fortunate she isn’t that kind. We should be overwhelmed with Schemes for the Amelioration of the Condition of This, That, and The Other Thing, until there would be nothing left but bankruptcy for all of us. No. I want no reformers in petticoats at the head of the Shawsheen Mills. But here I am at my street. Good-bye, till evening.”

Salome Shepard passed a dull afternoon. Although a young woman of resources she found herself in no mood to enjoy any of them after lunch. The newest volume of essays seemed insufferably dull, and she turned for relief to the latest novel; but, in spite of the fact that this book was talked about throughout the country, she soon threw it aside with a wearied air and sat gazing into the blazing hickory fire.

Strange! but the red-hot coals formed themselves into a group against the dull back-log like the groups of miserable, excited men and women of the morning against a background of rain and fog and muddy streets. It was an uncomfortable picture, and she rose suddenly, and, going into the music-room, seated herself at the piano. Chopin’s Nocturnes stood open on the rack, but she tossed them aside and began some stormy Liszt music, breaking off when half done and going to the window.

The rain had begun to fall again and the fog had settled like a pall over everything farther off than the arched gateway. She wondered if all those people were still standing in the mud and rain.

An elderly lady, with soft white hair and exquisite laces, came in.

Salome ran forward, pushed her aunt’s favorite chair into the position she liked best, and put her into it.

“Why did you stop playing? And why did you attempt that brilliant thing?” said Mrs. Soule. “You are so dreadfully out of practice, you know.”

“It wasn’t that,” answered the younger woman; “I’m not in the mood for playing anything. I doubt if I could get through with ‘Bounding Billows’ or the ‘Fifteenth Amusement’ to-day. Did you know, aunty, there is a strike down at the mills?”

“A strike! Mercy, who has struck?” responded the elder in shocked tones.

“Why, the operatives, of course. I don’t know why, or anything about it. I have never shown any interest in the mills,” she went on eagerly and half-apologetically, “but I should like to know what it is all about—why they did it—what they want, and all that. I should think Mr. Greenough would come up here.”

“He will come as soon as he deems it proper.” Mrs. Soule’s voice was calmness and precision itself. “It is not nice for young ladies to mix themselves up in such common things.”

“But, aunty,” laughed Salome, “strikes are not common things here. We never had one before. And I am not so very young a lady as to need the same careful guardianship I had when I was sixteen. I am twenty-seven years old.”

“There is no need of saying so upon all occasions, if you are,” replied her aunt with some asperity. “A strike, like all things connected with, or originated by the ignorant laboring class, is common in the sense of being vulgar. Any woman, young or old, brought up as delicately and carefully as you have been, demeans herself by connection with such things. You have an agent—a manly and capable one; leave the settlement of such things to him.”

“Oh, I’m not going to meddle with the strike. The very suggestion that I would wish to have anything to do with settling the difficulty makes me laugh.”

Salome rose and began to pace the room. “But sometimes, lately, aunty, it has occurred to me that a young woman of average talent, with a great business on her hands which employs two thousand people, may have something to do in life more than to seek her own selfish enjoyment—a pursuit which, after all, is not elevating and leaves but a restless, unsatisfied spirit in its wake. I came across some of grandfather’s manuscripts two or three weeks ago and have been reading them. He wasn’t like papa. The mills were a part of his very self. The operatives were almost like so many children to him. I’ve read in his, and in other books, about the mill-girls of his day. Girls whose working days began at daylight in winter and ended at half-past seven in the evening; who had only two dresses to their backs, and those of Merrimack print; whose profits for a week, after their board was paid, were only two dollars. But girls who could discuss Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton at their looms; who read Locke and Abercrombie and Pollock and Young (something I can’t do!); who sent petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery; who helped build churches from their pitiful savings; who wrote essays and poems and stories, even while running their looms; who spent their evenings in the study of German and French and botany; and who went out, at last, to become teachers and mothers and missionaries, and, above all, noble, self-sacrificing, helpful women. And I tell you that, with all my money and my polished education, I envy them.”

“Salome, really, you surprise me,” exclaimed the excellent lady who was listening to her. “Calm yourself, my dear.”

“Look at the girls in this mill—in my grandfather’s mill to-day—in my mill,” she went on. “Beings of bangs and bangles and cheap jewelry, of low aspirations, and correspondingly low morals! They are not to blame for their penny-dreadful lives, because they know no better. They dream of nothing higher than their looms and their face-powder, and their cheap satins and false hair—why should they? They see rich and educated women like us wrapped entirely in ourselves, each anxious to outshine the rest, and all seemingly lost in the mad race after fashionable attire. They do not know, poor things, that we ever think or talk of higher subjects. I tell you, I feel that I am, somehow, responsible for them. And yet, I don’t know how to help them. My grandfather could, but I can’t.”

“I know nothing of such things,” coldly replied her aunt. “It is not ladylike to fly into a passion over the fancied wrongs of a lower order of beings. I beg that you will recollect that you are the daughter of Cora Le Bourdillon and Floyd Shepard.”

“And more than that,” Salome whispered to herself as she sought the quiet of her own room, “I am afraid I am the grand-daughter of Newbern Shepard.”

IV.

It was nearly eight o’clock when carriage-wheels were heard coming up the graveled drive-way, and Otis Greenough and his associates were announced. Salome and her aunt were sitting in the music-room, and came forward at once; the former with an unmistakable air of eagerness.

“Tell me about the strike, Mr. Greenough,” she asked, before he had fairly seated himself.

“Oh, then, you’d heard of it, eh?” he asked.

“I saw something of it this morning, driving through the town. I could not help knowing what it was. But why did they do it? What do they want?”

“They did it,” and Otis Greenough sat up with a judicial air, “because they are rascally dogs, and do not know when they are well off. And they want?—well,—the earth—more pay, shorter hours, and the Lord knows what besides.”

“Well, and why shouldn’t they have it?”

The question fell like a bomb upon her surprised audience.

“To be sure, I know very little of these things, practically, although I have taken the prescribed doses of social economy in my readings under Professor Townsend,” she went on; “but it has occurred to me, within a few days, that the laboring classes have very little control over their own lives, and are not much more than slaves to us who hold the reins of power.”

“Bless me!” thought Otis Greenough, staring at her. If his office-door had suddenly spoken, offering him officious counsel as to his method of conducting the mills, he could hardly have been more surprised. “Bless me! No Floyd Shepard about her.”

“If the operatives are poorly paid, and we are making more money than ever before (I think I understood you so the other day?),” the young woman was saying, “why shouldn’t their wages be raised? It seems but fair, to me.”

“Much you know about it, little girl,” Mr. Greenough found voice to say, addressing her as he used to in by-gone days, when she occasionally strayed into the mills and teased to be taken through them. “Much any young lady of the world can know of such matters. We would not have you turn from being your own charming self, and become a learned blue-stocking, or bloomered reformer; but there are many, many reasons which come between the questions of profit and loss, and the petty details of operatives’ wages, which cannot be explained to you here and now. They were contented enough until some rascal or other, having become imbued with the spirit of these labor unions starting up all over the country, must needs organize one here. By Jove! I’ll employ detectives and hunt out the disturbing elements and shut them up. I have offered every mother’s son a chance to go back to work to-morrow morning, on condition that he drops this union business; but I am told to-night that not one of them will accept. Ignorant creatures! I’ll show ’em what it means to fight a rich and strong concern like this, in the vain hope of bringing us to their terms.”

“Meanwhile,” it was Villard who spoke, “we are to go on resisting their combined ignorance and impatience, and perhaps worse elements, losing thousands of dollars in the warfare, are we?”

“Yes, rather than give in one inch to them,” answered Mr. Greenough. “This is the first organized strike and must be made a warning to future disturbers. It’s those confounded Englishmen trying to transplant their foreign ideas to American soil. If we give in to them now, we establish a bad precedent.”

“I must confess,” said Villard, “that I do not see it. I have seen several strikes, and know that generally both sides lose sight of reason, and determine to fight it out regardless of cost. I am afraid, with the course you propose to adopt, sir, that we shall go on until the losses on our side or the suffering and privation on theirs will become unbearable; and then one side or the other will be forced to yield. If it should be they, a smouldering resentment will be left, ready to break out anew at the first convenient season. If we, they will feel encouraged to try still more arbitrary measures in the future. Or if a compromise be effected, it will be one that might as well be made to-morrow.”

“You talk well for a young man,” admitted Mr. Greenough. “How did you come by your exceedingly humane and sympathetic views?”

“I began as an employe myself,” answered Villard, “and I know how they feel to some extent. I know what it is to work at the lowest drudgery of a mill, and can imagine how it must seem to have no hope of ever rising to a higher position. Hard, unremitting toil, long hours with endless years of hopeless work in prospect, the lowest possible wages, a large and rapidly increasing family, with perhaps an aged parent or invalid wife to support—I tell you lots of those fellows have all that to bear, knowing the utter impossibility of ever saving anything, or of raising their own condition. I say, sir, looking at life from their standpoint, it’s mighty hard.”

“Well, well,” put in Mr. Greenough, testily, “a great many of them want nothing better. They would not know what to do with a better chance for life, as you call it, if they had it.”

“Simply put yourself in their place, sir,” said Villard. “What if you were forty years younger than you are, and condemned to a life of toil at the looms, for instance, would you not claim the right to combine with others of like occupation and interests and ask for a better chance? These men of ours have taken an unreasonable way of asserting themselves, but I think they are entitled to our respect, and should be dealt with as men. An open, fair discussion of the wage question or the ten-hour law can result in nothing but good for both sides.”

“You are young,” Mr. Greenough replied, “and believe everything in this world can be made to run exactly as you want it. When you are older, you’ll realize better the indifference and general mulishness of the world, and of operatives in particular. I do not believe in meeting and deferring to them as equals. They are not worth our efforts, and so long as they are under the influence of hot-headed devils who pose as labor reformers, just so long we are going to see trouble.”

“If we were to make a fair compromise with them,” Mr. Burnham was speaking for the first time, “and let them see that we, as humane employers, have a greater desire for their interest than any foreigner can have, wouldn’t it work a reaction in our favor? From a strictly business point of view, perhaps it would be money in our pockets.”

“Yes,” urged Villard, “if we were to show ourselves willing to consider an intimate knowledge of their needs and thus prove ourselves their best friends, it would be only a case of practical philanthropy, and one which would raise our profits every year, I believe. It is only the first step that costs, you know.”

“I don’t believe it,” stoutly maintained the agent. “In my day there has been very little talk of managers and owners deferring to their help. I hire my own operatives and reserve the right to raise, or lower, their wages as I please.”

“But, Mr. Greenough,” broke in Salome eagerly, “don’t you consider their circumstances at all? Don’t you, for instance, in a driving time, pay them any higher wages than in dull times? I think there would be nothing but fairness in that.”

“My dear young lady,” was the answer in patronizing tones, “don’t bother your brains with such things. You cannot understand them. Why try?”

“Imagine our Salome posing as a philanthropist or a social economist,” interrupted Mrs. Soule’s mellifluous tones. “We had a great laugh over the idea this afternoon.”

Salome bit her lip and said nothing.

“I think,” continued her aunt in the same smooth accents, “that we have talked business long enough. I am sure, Mr. Greenough, that Salome is, and will be perfectly satisfied with any course you may see fit to adopt with regard to the strikers. Women, you know, ladies at least, have no heads for business, and we, certainly,” with an indescribable turn of voice on the “we”—“we, certainly, have had no training to fit us for reformers. And now shall we not have some music? Salome, dear, will you play that delightful little suite of Moscowzki’s that I like so well?”

The young woman rose and, going to the piano, did as she was bid, although somewhat mechanically. Then Mr. Greenough proposed a song from Mr. Burnham, who possessed a fine baritone voice, and the evening wore away with music and light conversation.

When the three men went home, the elder was in fine spirits, in spite of having been shocked and discomfited to an unusual degree, by the unexpected disclosure of views which he termed “strong-minded” on the part of the fair owner of the Shawsheen Mills.

“If there should come to be hard times and perhaps destitution among the operatives before this difficulty is settled,” Salome said to John Villard as he was preparing to go, “such destitution as we read of in foreign countries in times of labor disturbances, I hope you will let me do something to relieve it. Strange as it may seem, I have a much better idea of such a state of affairs there than here—among my own mills.”

“There will be no such state of affairs, I trust,” was his reply, “as is pictured in English novels.”

“You have guessed accurately as to the sources of my information,” she laughed.

He smiled too, and continued,

“Meanwhile, if we pursue the policy proposed,” and he glanced at Mr. Greenough, who was making gallant speeches to Mrs. Soule, “you might keep a watchful eye on the help. You could tell, you know, by the women, if they came to absolute distress. Of course, there is no knowing how long this thing may last.”

“Me! You look to me for such a thing,” and it was hard to tell whether her tone was amused or sarcastic only. “Why, Mr. Villard, I do not know one of the operatives in the mills—not even by sight. If I were to meet them on the main thoroughfare to-morrow I should not know them from other women of their class.”

John Villard raised his eyebrows and turned to put on his coat without another word. The situation was incomprehensible to him.

Salome saw this, and winced under it. She made no further attempt at conversation, but said good-night graciously to Mr. Greenough and the older superintendent, recognizing Villard’s parting nod at the door.

“There,” said her aunt, as they went back into the firelight, “I hope they won’t feel it necessary to come here and consult with us again so long as the strike is on. As though you knew or cared anything for it, my dear! But, of course, they had to come as a matter of form. Any way, I’m glad it is over. Play something.”

Salome complied, playing the first thing which came to her mind—the opening bars of the Sonata Pathetique.

“I wish,” she said to herself as she disrobed for the night, “that I were a capable woman of affairs—and that John Villard were my agent.”

V.

Not for a week could enough new help be hired to even make a show of opening the Shawsheen Mills. Labor Unions were a comparatively new thing in this country, and were not so thoroughly organized as now; and a few of the old operatives, rather than starve, were glad to go back into the mills on any condition. But the great majority refused with indignation to give up their claims, and proceeded to “make things hot,” as they expressed it, for the “scabs” and “mudsills.”

Work was attempted in the mills, although many looms stood silent and the spinning-mules were entirely deserted. Thread for warp was procured from a neighboring city at no small expense and the mills were run at a loss, to prove the agent’s assertion that “he would show them who was manager of the Shawsheen Mills.”

This sort of thing was kept up four days. On the fifth morning, the operatives went as usual to the mill, but the machinery, after a few insufficient groans, gave up in despair and settled into utter quiet.

What was the matter?

There was a great hurrying to and fro, and a close examination of belts and machinery. Word was soon brought up from the basement. The engines had been tampered with; on each of them the belts had been cut. The jocularly inclined said the “engines had joined the Union;”—while everybody wondered what effect this stroke would have on the agent.

The premises were examined and the night-watchman questioned. Evidently the deed had been done by some one familiar with the place, but there was not the slightest clue. He had done well his work, and the mills were stopped for repairs.

Otis Greenough blustered about and cursed the whole business; but he was farther than ever from a compromise, declaring that he would yet beat them with their own weapons.

The night-watch was doubled and the mills were opened again the next day. But the employers were fighting a desperate party and little calculated their strength. The man who had succeeded so well in his first attempt to stop the mills risked himself again; and on the second morning the machinery again refused to start. This time a small wheel had been removed from each engine and carried away. The water-wheel had long been in partial disuse and could not be trusted without the engines. Hence, there was nothing to be done but to stop again for repairs. This time it was a week before the engines were in running order. And yet, not a word passed between the agent and the strikers.

The night-watch were discharged and new ones engaged. A special police was secured to patrol the mill-yard, and when the mills were again opened, it was with the avowed determination to keep them going in spite of every earthly power.

The next morning, notwithstanding the positive assertions of police and night-watch that no one had been near the mills, every band connecting the looms to the machinery above was cut in half a dozen places. Then the superstitious operatives whispered among themselves that unseen agencies were linked with the Union, and that the strikers must succeed in the end; and many of the fainthearted went over to the new labor party.

“It is of no use trying to run the mills in this way,” said Mr. Burnham. “We have already lost several thousand dollars. We must compromise.”

“Never,” said Mr. Greenough. “The terms of Floyd Shepard’s will grant me absolute power here, and so long as I live, it shall never be said that an educated, trained and levelheaded business man was overcome by a lot of ignorant bullies and agitators. These Labor Unions all over the State need an example. There is money enough in the mill treasury to fight them until they starve themselves out. No other mill or corporation about here will hire them, and it is only a matter of weeks or months when absolute poverty forces them to yield. Not one inch will I give in to them. They shall come back as beggars, glad to accept work at even lower wages than they have ever had. I’ll teach them a lesson.”

Geoffrey Burnham turned away full of anger that a flourishing business should be destroyed by one man’s obstinacy. John Villard went back to the silent looms, full of righteous indignation, not only at the total disregard of practical business interests, but at the want of humanity and philanthropy and Christian charity, which by his subordinate position he must seem to countenance.

Weeks lengthened themselves into months, and still the Shawsheen Mills were closed.

Salome Shepard, after spending the holiday season with friends in New York, came home, satiated with social success, and a little tired of the endless pursuit of pleasure. Still the mills lay idle and Otis Greenough refused to talk any more with her on the subject of the strike. And the terms of her father’s will held her powerless, even had she chosen to exercise her authority.

But she chafed under the knowledge that two thousand people, who were in a sense dependent upon her for their daily bread, were out of work in the midst of a hard winter.

One day she went to walk down among the people who were suffering, now, for a principle.

She was amazed at the gaunt, hungry look of the old men; and self-accused at the pinched and wan faces of the few children who played in the narrow streets. Unthinking, she had put on a seal-skin cloak. It was a cold day, and furs, to her, were only a natural accompaniment to the frosts of winter.

But going down the uncared-for side-walk, she rebuked herself, noting the single shawl and calico dress of an old woman who was wearily making her way a few paces in front of her. Presently the woman stopped, seized with a paroxysm of coughing.

Salome came up with her, and looked into the white face, which told of hard times.

“Madam,” she said, respectfully, “can I be of any assistance to you? Shall I not help you home?”

Her tone and manner were exactly the same she would have used to any of her aunt’s friends. It did not occur to her to be patronizing or condescending.

The old woman stared at her. She was not used to being addressed as “Madam.”

“Yes’m,” she said, presently. “I live up to the other end of the street. If the cough wasn’t so bad, an’ my side didn’t ketch me so! But if I can git back to my own chair ag’in——”

Another fit of coughing seized her, and interrupted the “garrulousness of uncultured old age.” Salome waited until she got breath again and then took her by the arm, accommodating her steps to the feebler ones.

Here and there a surprised face peered curiously at her through a dirty window, knowing who she was, and wondering that she condescended to walk with old Granny Lancaster. Everywhere a general air of poverty, perhaps of actual hunger, impressed this woman, who had inherited the tumble-down tenement houses on each side.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, “but do you eat nourishing food enough? Good beef-steak and roast-beef would help your cough more than medicine.”

The old woman laughed, a grating, cackling laugh.

“Beef-steak and roast-beef ain’t for the likes o’ me,” she said. “Meat of any kind ain’t for us in times o’ strikes. May the Lord above send us oatmeal enough to keep us through till the mills open ag’in is all I ask. Here’s my house. Much ’bleeged, lady.”

Salome wanted to go inside the rickety old door and follow the woman up the dirty stairway, but she did not say so, and the old woman hobbled up the steps without asking her in.

Salome felt impulsively in her pocket, and drawing out her porte-monnaie, emptied its contents into the dirty, emaciated palm of Granny Lancaster. Then she turned and walked rapidly back home.

The next day Otis Greenough called on her.

“My dear,” he said, after an hour or two passed in desultory conversation, “may I beg that you will keep away from the operatives? Impulsive and injudicious charity does them more harm than anything else. No doubt the part of Lady Bountiful seems a pleasant and desirable one, but, just now, you are not fitted for it.”

“What do you mean, sir?” asked she in a puzzled tone.

“For instance,” he went on, “the money you gave a certain old woman on the corporation yesterday was taken by her son-in-law last night, and furnished him an opportunity for a glorious old drunk. I beg your pardon for using their phraseology. He was arrested before morning for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.”

“I do not comprehend,” she stammered. “The woman said they had no meat. She was actually suffering for nourishing food. I gave the money, impulsively it is true, but that they need not go hungry.”

“Now, you see, my dear,” he answered, “just how much encouragement one gets in trying to do anything for the laboring classes. They turn upon you and use the goodness of your heart and your generous motives to drag themselves down to a lower depth of degradation. Good-day, my dear, and don’t be led away by your feelings.”

Salome stood looking after him, heart-sick and discouraged. The world—her part of it, at least—was all wrong, and she, with plenty of money and an awakening desire to help, was powerless. She ordered the pony phaeton again and started for a drive. She obeyed a sudden impulse to go through the factory precincts. There were evidences of a suppressed excitement. Knots of desperate-looking men stood about. But they hushed their voices as she drew near, and stood in sullen silence as she passed.

“There is evidently something in the wind,” she thought, urging the pony to quicken his pace.

She did not know that the committee from the Labor Union had that morning made a third attempt to treat with her agent and failed.

“No compromise,” was still his watchword.

“I’ll send for Marion Shaw,” she said to herself, on her way home an hour later. “She is a practical, sensible, business-like woman. Perhaps she will know of some way to help me to help others. And she needs rest.”

This idea so inspired her that she arrived home quite elated, and stated her plan to Mrs. Soule at dinner-time with much animation.

But later in the evening, the groups of men she had seen on “the corporation” came back to her mind and caused her a certain feeling of uneasiness. What had they been talking about so excitedly as she drew near?

It was one of those suddenly warm nights in January that succeed, in our fickle climate, a bitter cold day, and Salome felt an unaccountable desire to be in the open air. She threw on a warm wrap and hood, and saying nothing, went out on the piazza, and crossed the lawn to a favorite walk of hers in summer—a path under a long group of fir-trees down by the street at the back of the house.

After a few turns, she heard a peculiar whistle which was answered by another.

She withdrew still more into the shadow and waited. Presently two men met.

“Well, what’s the news?” eagerly asked one.

“Sh—sh! not so loud,” replied the other. “It’s all right, and better than we expected.”

“Why—how better?” asked the first.

They spoke lower, so that Salome could scarcely catch the tones.

“Because,” the first was saying, “the old man himself has gone down to the mill.”

“Whe—e—w!”

“Yes. What on earth possessed him? But then that’s none of our affairs. If he wants to run the risk of losing his life—that’s his business, not mine.”

“Well, but,” and the first voice had a timid note, “that’s going too far—we were only to blow up the mill—not to kill anybody.”

“Can’t help that. Fifteen minutes more, if everything works well, and old man Greenough’s day is over. Jim’s just about lighting the fuse, I reckon, now. It’s an awful long one, but the fire’ll creep round there in time.”

“What about the police?”

“He’s all right. We’ve fixed him.”

The voices grew fainter and ceased altogether, only the dull sound of the men’s footsteps reaching her as they passed down the hill away from the grounds.

Salome stood an instant, rooted to the spot. What was this horrible thing she had heard?

The factory to be blown up?

She must go for help.

And Mr. Greenough down there, risking his life?

No. There was no time to get help.

“Fifteen minutes more, if everything works well, and old man Greenough’s day is over.”

The whole plot flashed across her bewildered brain. She dashed through the back-gate and down the deserted street towards the mills. It was a ten minutes’ walk across that way, but she ran,—flew,—tore down the lonely road in less than half that time.

Otis Greenough might be an unreasonable, hot-headed, obstinate agent, but he was her father’s friend and had loved and petted her when she was a motherless child.

What could she do? Raise an alarm? Call for help? Rouse everybody?

But the fuse was already lighted.

Where was it?

Under the office window most likely, since they knew that the old agent was in there.

She came in sight of that window. There was a dim light there. All else was dark. The south wind moaned dismally.

She hurried faster and came nearer the office window. Under it was another window with a broken pane, from which hung something she instantly divined as the fuse.

Yes. A fiery spark crept closer and closer to the wall.

By the time she reached the window it was out of her reach.

Oh, God! could she do nothing?

She had been sewing on some dainty trifle earlier in the evening, and a pair of small scissors still hung at her waist.

Closer drew the spark of fire to the broken window pane, whence it would disappear to work its fearful errand. It seemed to twinkle and mock at her in fiendish delight. She grasped the jutting window-frame and jumped upon the broad sill.

Thank God, she had it at last. One snip of her scissors, and the spark of fire dropped harmlessly to the ground. She turned slightly to step off the window-ledge. Her foot slipped and she fell, a white, faint heap upon the ground.

VI.

When she opened her eyes again, not only Otis Greenough but John Villard and an office-boy were bending anxiously over her.

“My dear girl,” the agent was saying, “bless me, my dear, what is it? How came you here and who has harmed you?”

“Don’t be alarmed, sir,” was her reply, as she got on her feet; and then, somewhat excitedly, she told the events of the last fifteen or twenty minutes, interrupted, every other sentence, by such ejaculations as, “Great Scott,” “Bless me,” “The rascals,” “Confound them,” from the elderly man, while the younger one listened in silent amazement.

Rapid search was made and the night-watch was found sleeping, in a stupor which was evidently the work of a drug; while the police were, as usual, nowhere to be found.

Salome was taken into the office—not without inward trembling, as she feared further evidences of the miscreants.

Mr. Villard soon reported two kegs of gunpowder and a small dynamite bomb in the room below, at the same time congratulating, most heartily, the young woman who had saved their lives as well as the mills.

But her courage was now at a low ebb, and, woman-like, she shivered at the close proximity of gunpowder, and begged to be taken home.

Mr. Greenough, who had come to realize the danger to himself and to the mills which his obstinacy had provoked, was also anxious to leave the premises and glad to accompany Salome home.

John Villard, meanwhile, attended to the duty of finding new watchmen who should be reliable,—a difficult task. Against his will, he promised Salome not to sleep at the mills, as he had been doing since the machinery had been tampered with.

Salome was nearly prostrated when she reached home, and had but little strength left with which to importune the agent to consent to any terms for a settlement; but as the old man was, for once, thoroughly frightened, it was not difficult to exact a promise that he would consider a compromise.

Mrs. Soule, when she learned of Salome’s intrepidity,—set forth as it was by Mr. Greenough’s gratitude and gallant appreciation,—was greatly concerned for her niece and put her straightway to bed, where, in fact, she had supposed her to be for the past hour, and where she wept over and caressed her as she had not done since the girl had left home for boarding-school. And then, what was far more to the purpose, she gave her a bath of alcohol and olive oil, and soothed her to sleep.

Early the next morning the agent of the Shawsheen Mills sent a messenger over to the dingy room which served as headquarters for the Labor Union, begging for an interview.

As this was the first overture of peace from his side, it was natural that it should be hailed with glee by the officers of the Union. And although, the day before, the leaders of the strike had been closeted together in a serious debate as to how much they should yield to Capital, they now unanimously agreed not to “weaken” in the smallest degree.

As for the agent, he had been persuaded to yield every point demanded by the strikers, insisting only upon the one condition, that the Labor Union should be disbanded.

The question of ten hours he granted without a murmur. He quibbled a long time over the wage question, and the subject of weekly payments, and only on seeing the dogged determination of the laborers did he come to terms on that. But he very properly, and too peremptorily, refused to remove the spinning frames which had formed one subject of contention. And then he proceeded to overthrow the good effects of what concessions he had made, by violently denouncing all labor unions, and vigorously insisting that the one known as the Shawsheen Labor Union be immediately and forever disbanded.

“Never,” said the foremost of the committee, “will we submit to so arbitrary a demand. We have a perfect right to organize our forces and assert our claims. How can we—a band of day-laborers,—dependent on capital for a bare living, win a single cause for ourselves without combinations of this kind? There are scores of questions which involve not our welfare in one way alone, but our health, our wages, our morals, our manhood, which we, as single individuals, can never cope with, but which, as a united force, we can adjust. Besides, in all departments of labor, the women and children equal or exceed the men. There are to-day one hundred and seventy-five thousand more women working in mills than there were ten years ago; and what are they but the weakest and most dependent of employes? They have no strength to agitate; they have no power to change any existing order of things. All they can do is to toil and submit. We owe it to them as men, as husbands, brothers, and sons, to lighten their burdens. As free American citizens we owe it to ourselves, to settle the conditions of our own lives, so far as may be. This can only be done by combinations of the laboring classes strong enough to compel manufacturers to concede us our rights.”

“You are right to a degree,” answered Villard, before Mr. Greenough could swallow his surprise at hearing such sentiments from one of his operatives; “I believe there are some rights which you can only secure by a combination of your forces as working-men. But when you let reason lose its sway, and passion take its place; when you are influenced by unworthy demagogues and unbalanced cranks, and seek to effect by strikes and such arbitrary measures what might be better secured by a more conciliatory course, you must not be surprised if you do not succeed in bull-dozing a rich concern like this into obedience, and——”

“And when, by your —— labour unions, you sink so low as to countenance incendiarism and murder—yes, sirs—that is what you attempted last night, sirs,—you can’t expect this mill is going to countenance them. I’ll see you all starve and rot first,” and Otis Greenough’s face was purple with anger.

“We have already disclaimed all knowledge in our Union, sir,” said one of the committee, “of last night’s outrage.”

“Blast it, what do I care for that?” roared the agent, as usual, out of temper. “Whether you knew it or not, it was done under cover of your strike, and your Union, and was one of the precious outgrowths of it. Give up the —— thing, I say—or there is no compromise with these mills.”

“There is little use in prolonging this interview, I am afraid,” said the first of the committee, taking up his hat.

“Impudent dogs!” said Mr. Greenough, as Villard tried to speak, anxious to put things on a more satisfactory basis before the meeting closed. “Let them go. They’ll find hard hoeing before they reach the end of their row.”

“And, sir,” retorted a fiery-looking man who had not spoken before, “if it comes to open war you’ll find us tough customers. We shall fight it out like men, even if we starve like beasts.”

And with these words the committee departed, leaving matters worse than ever before in the affairs of the Shawsheen Mills.

In vain did the two superintendents plead and argue and threaten the choleric old agent. His blood was up and he was a veritable charger on the eve of battle. There was no state board of arbitration then, and therefore no available way of settling their difficulties except among themselves. And as discussion only made matters worse, the subject which was always uppermost in these three men’s minds was tacitly dropped. Every precaution was taken to insure the mills from the danger it had escaped the night before, and a detective was obtained from Boston to hunt out the criminals who had perpetrated the dastardly act.

At noon, they were all surprised by a note from Miss Shepard. It ran as follows:

“Dear Mr. Greenough,

“As the owner of the Shawsheen Mill property, I hereby appoint a meeting of all its officers at my house, to-night. Please have them here at eight o’clock.

“Pardon me for the liberty I have seemed to take, and believe me ever a loving and respectful friend,

“Salome Shepard.”

“Well, you hear that, boys,” said Mr. Greenough, after reading it aloud. “Be on hand. Tell the treasurer and cashier and head book-keeper. We’ll all be there. The Lord only knows what she is up to; but if that young woman hasn’t got a level head on her shoulders, then I don’t know who has.”

“I reckon you’re right, sir,” echoed Mr. Burnham, while John Villard laughed in his sleeve at the young woman who evidently dreamed of settling a prolonged strike. “Why,” he said to himself, “she has never known enough of the practical side of mill-life to recognize one of her operatives, and hardly knows the different brands of cloth manufactured by them.”

Salome Shepard had waked at an early hour that morning and found herself unable to sleep again. Her mind was alive with gratitude for the part she had been able to play the night before, with apprehension for the future, and with increasing self-accusation for the state of things in the Shawsheen Mills, both past and present.

“Pshaw!” she said to herself while dressing, true to her habit of communing with her own conscience in default of a visible mentor, “how can I be blamed for the state of things here? The entire business of the mills was put out of my hands by my father’s will. I could have done no differently.”

“You could,” replied that sternest of modern inquisitors—a New England conscience. “It was in your power to see that the moral and physical condition of these people was improved and cultivated. It was in your power to give them better homes and more privileges. It was in your power to raise their standards of life and to create new ones. But you have ignored their very existence, and let them live a mean and sordid life of unremitting toil, in order to furnish you with money to live a selfish life of luxurious ease.”

Salome tied the blue ribbons to her wrapper, and giving her crimps a last touch went down to breakfast.

Knowing she would be opposed, she said nothing of her plans for the morning to her aunt, but simply announced, after they had left the table, that she was going for a long walk.

Then she went upstairs and put on the plainest costume she owned (which, by the way, was a tailor-made gown that had cost her one hundred and fifty dollars), and started for the tenement houses where her operatives lived.

It did not occur to her to feel any fear; nor that the miscreants who had planned the explosion for the previous night might be watching her footsteps. She felt it incumbent upon her to see for herself exactly how these people lived, and what they were bearing and suffering in consequence of the strike.

In the bright glare of the morning sun, the tenement houses had never looked so dingy and mean. They were built in Newbern Shepard’s day, and had received but very few repairs since that time. Although it was cold January weather, Salome counted a dozen panes of glass gone from the first house, and noticed that the lower hinge to the front door was broken. It was a two-story wooden building with four tenements of four rooms each.

She ascended the rickety steps and rapped on the door. One of the women saw her from a front window and came to the door, holding it open only so far as to permit her to see the strange caller.

“Good-morning,” said Salome in pleasant tones.

“Good-morning, miss.” The politeness of Salome’s manner thawed the other woman, and the door opened a little wider. “Will you walk in?”

That was precisely what she had come for, and Salome stepped inside with alacrity. She found herself in the sitting-room and living-room of the family. It was a meager home. The remnant of a faded oil-cloth was on the floor. The walls were unpapered and devoid of any attempts at ornament, except one unframed, dilapidated old lithograph of “The Queen of the West,”—a buxom young woman with disproportionately large black eyes, a dress of bright scarlet cut extremely décolleté, and cheeks of a yet more vivid hue. A pine table covered with a stamped red cloth was littered with cheap, trashy story-papers and pamphlets addressed “To the Laboring Men of America.” An old lounge, with broken springs, and six common wooden chairs constituted the other furnishings of the room.

Salome’s first thought as she looked about her was:

“I don’t wonder these people get discontented and clamor for something which seems to them better.”

But she found, before the forenoon was over, many houses that were not so pleasant as this. For, once inside these rooms, everything was neat and clean, and the woman who answered her questions was civil if not talkative.

She found that five people lived in these four small rooms: this woman, her two daughters, a son-in-law, and a grandchild. She also found that the other tenements contained five, six, and seven people, making twenty-three in all. There were absolutely no sanitary arrangements, and she discovered that the sanitation of this tenement house district consisted only of surface drainage. According to the statements of her hostess, there was nearly always somebody “ailing” in these houses.

The first house she went into was a fair sample of the remainder. A few were slightly better, but more were in a worse condition. In most instances she was respectfully received, although at three houses she was met by ungracious people, and received gruff replies to her kindly-put inquiries.

Everywhere, strong, able-bodied men were lounging about in enforced idleness; and one of them, resenting, with true American independence, this intrusion into the sacred precincts of his miserable home, plainly intimated that “they was well enough off now, and didn’t want no rich folks as was livin’ on money they earned, to come pryin’ round their houses.” Finally, at the last of the tenement houses she was met by a surly, burly mule-spinner, who gruffly refused her admittance.

Nothing daunted, however, she sought out a boarding-house for the young women of the mills. The landlady, recognizing her, invited her in and willingly told her all about the life of mill-girls, offering, at last, to show her their rooms.

Salome gladly accepted and followed the woman up bare, unpainted stairs to the rooms on the second and third floors. These were small and perfectly bare of comforts, almost of necessities. The floors were uncarpeted and guiltless of paint, or even of a very recent application of soap and water. They had no closets. A common pine bedstead—sometimes two of them—in each room, two chairs, in one of which stood a tin basin, while beside it on the floor stood a bucket of water, and a small bureau, made up the sum total of the furniture. In only one room did Salome see any evidences of a literary taste, and that, if she had known it, was a cheap paper, the worst of the sensational class.

Salome’s heart sank within her. She no longer wondered that the mill-girls of to-day were a discontented, ignorant set, nor that many of them sank into lives of degradation.

“The rooms are good enough for the girls,” said the woman, noticing the look of disgust on Salome’s tell-tale face. “They seem poor enough to elegant ladies like you. But these girls know no better. And they are good enough to sleep off a drunk in,” she added, roughly.

“You don’t mean to say,” asked her guest, “that any of your girls get intoxicated?”

“Intoxicated? I don’t know what else you’d call it, when they have to be helped in at eleven o’clock Saturday night, and put to bed, and don’t get up again until Monday morning.”

Salome was sick with pity and shame for her sex. She no longer questioned whether she had a mission toward these, her people.

She went home and wrote the note to Mr. Greenough, given in an earlier part of this chapter.

VII.

Promptly, at the hour named, Otis Greenough, accompanied by the other officers of the mill, appeared at the mansion of the Shepard family.

Tall, beautiful, and always impressive in her bearing, Salome was at her best to-night. The fire of a new-born purpose was in her face, and a new force, born of spiritual struggles, stamped upon her brow.