338 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



" The food was horrible ! The mercenary wretches em- 

 ployed to grind, and starve, and rot the life out of several 

 thousand helpless girls, proved worthy of their employers ! 

 They were just as ruthless barterers in human flesh as hell 

 could ask, or millionaires applaud ! 



" Since, I have walked in the track of plague, leprosy, 

 cholera, and fever — but I have never seen any thing so 

 humiliating to personal dignity — so oppressive to individual 

 health — so brutal in regard to the ordinary sympathies as the 

 whole system of these mills. The poor children of strength 

 and poverty die off, as regularly as the moths of the silk- 

 worm, in three or four years at the most — or else they con- 

 geal into a sort of old-maid-withered state, which, in its 

 wrinkled and horrid distortions, is more monstrous than any 

 thing this side the English colliers ! — according to Parlia- 

 mentary Reports ! 



" I could not be a slave ! I would not be a minion. I left 

 the mills — I left my family with the determination to work 

 somehow — to redeem the earth from this great evil. 



" This was a vast undertaking for a poor forlorn female. 

 But, nevertheless, I had strong feelings that something could 

 be done, even by one so humble as myself. But first I had 

 to earn my own bread, and as my education had been good, 

 and I had read eagerly since my early childhood, I thought 

 myself qualified to act as governess, and advertised. I soon 

 found a place. It happened to be in a rich and visionary 

 family, every member of which had mounted some particular 

 hobby of its own. I thought myself in heaven for awhile, 

 but soon began to perceive that hobbies are hobbies. 



" I found this family of world-saviours — for no one of them 

 was any thing short ! — the most intense self-ists I had ever 

 met. The only merit they possessed was obstinacy. Each 

 one held to his or her opinion with a ludicrous pertinacity, 

 and the house was one continuous Babel of controversy. All 

 the reform topics of the day were thus, continually dinned 



