![]() 5 (which imprint is still legible over the door), in the first block of tenements then built, I began my life among factory people. …we walked with our mother to the Tremont Corporation, where we were to live, and at the old No. She secured a house for her, and my mother, with her little brood and her few household belongings, started for the new factory town. Angeline Cudworth, who kept a factory boarding-house in Lowell, advised her to come to that city. Shortly after this my mother’s widowed sister, Mrs. And so I went to the sewing-school, like any other little girl who was taking lessons in sewing and not as a “charity child ” until a certain day when something was said by one of the teachers, about me, as a “poor little girl,”-a thoughtless remark, no doubt, such as may be said to-day in “charity schools.” When I went home I told my mother that the teacher said I was poor, and she replied in her sententious manner, “You need not go there again.” My mother had never complained of her poverty in our hearing, and I had accepted the conditions of my life with a child’s trust, knowing nothing of the relative difference between poverty and riches. We all, except the baby, went to school every day, and Saturday afternoons I went to a charity school to learn to sew. That was a hard, cold winter and for warmth’s sake my mother and her four children all slept in one bed, two at the foot and three at the head,-but her richer neighbor could not get the little daughter and, contrary to all the modern notions about hygiene, we were a healthful and a robust brood. My father was a carpenter, and some of his fellow-workmen helped my mother to open a little shop, where she sold small stores, candy, kindling-wood, and so on, but there was no great income from this, and we soon became poorer than ever. ![]() ![]() But my mother, who had had a hard experience in her youth in living amongst strangers, said, “No while I have one meal of victuals a day, I will not part with my children.” I always remembered this speech because of the word “victuals,” and I wondered for a long time what this good old Bible word meant. And so it happened that one of her more wealthy neighbors, who had looked with longing eyes on the one little daughter of the family, offered to adopt me. In 1831, under the shadow of a great sorrow, which had made her four children fatherless,-the oldest but seven years of age,-my mother was left to struggle alone and, although she tried hard to earn bread enough to fill our hungry mouths, she could not do it, even with the help of kind friends. Our home was in Boston, in Leverett Court, now Cotting Street, where I was born the year the corner-stone was laid for the Bunker Hill Monument, as my mother told me always to remember. In attempting to describe the life and times of the early mill-girls, it has seemed best for me to write my story in the first person not so much because my own experience is of importance, as that it is, in some respects, typical of that of many others who lived and worked with me. ![]()
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