It was mob opened, and then ran yelling after the carriage. too fast for them. Up Court Street, down Leverett Street. Ponderous gates swung open-the carriage dashed in. The gates closed with a bang, and Garrison was safe in Leverett Street jail, where he could hear the howling of the pack of human wolves that had pursued him. Very early next morning, to prevent another and a more dangerous riot, he was sent out of Boston to a place of concealment and safety. This was Boston forty years ago-Boston, where Phillips has lectured and Parker preached, and which sent Charles Sumner a senator to Washington-Sumner, whose father was sheriff and governor of the very prison which was at that day the only safe place in Boston for William Lloyd Garrison. CHAPTER X. LOWELL. It was ABOUT the year 1835 I lived in Lowell, Massachusetts, a manufacturing town some twenty-five miles north of Boston. the first important manufacturing town in America, and is still the largest. The falls of the Merrimack river furnish abundant water-power. There is a dam across the river above the falls, and the water from this basin is brought to the factories, machine-shops, &c., by a canal sixty feet wide. These works are owned by an incorporated company, and each of the ten manufacturing companies pays this company for its site and water-power. At the time of my residence in Lowell, the population did not exceed ten thousand. Two-thirds of the whole were opera tives, and a large proportion of these were young women, not residents, but daughters of the country farmers a hundred miles around, who had come to the factories to work a few months or years, and lay up money for their marriage-portions. covered waggons-such as are called vans in England-went about the country collecting the rosy maidens from villages and rural districts, and conveying them to the factories. Great Among these girls were many of exceeding beauty-that delicate beauty nowhere else found in greater perfection. Many were well educated. Some of them were contributors to a monthly magazine, called the Lowell Offering, selections from which have been published in a small volume in England, entitled, Mind among the Spindles. Some of these young ladies cultivated music in their leisure hours, and had pianofortes in their private parlours, and tended their looms none the worse for it. It is certain that while the greater part came to earn money for their own setting-out in life, many came to relieve a father from debt, to help a widowed mother and younger orphan children; and there were instances of brave girls who earned in the cottonmill the money which supported a brother in college—the brother who afterwards became a senator, perhaps. The Lowell of that day was a very curious place. The girls all boarded in blocks of regularly built boarding-houses, owned by the manufacturing corporations, and managed by persons in their employ, under very strict rules of their making. No girl was allowed to be out after a certain hour. Up to that time the brilliantly lighted shopping streets would be full of girls; then the bells rang, they hasted home, the shops closed, and the streets were desolate. The boarding-house regulations were as strict as those of a fashionable boarding-school. It was well worth going to some of the churches on Sunday. There were a thousand girls from fifteen to twenty-five-rarely one older-all dressed with neatness and even a degree of elegance, and, scattered about, a hundred men perhaps, who seemed quite lost and unprotected-as forlorn as one man with eleven women in an omnibus. In the dog-days, 90° in the shade, what a whirr it was, with the flutter of a thousand fans! And how the Methodist hymns rang out with a thousand soprano and contralto voices with the almost inaudible undertones of bass and tenor! In congregational churches the girls, being in such an overwhelming majority, exercised their right to vote; and as the few men were of no account against them, they deposed disagreeable ministers, and invited those they liked better, at their own sweet wills; and as they paid their salaries, why not? They paid their money, and they took their choice; and if they preferred a young, handsome, and agreeable preacher, to an old, ugly, and sour one, who shall blame them? The Methodist girls were obliged to take those who were sent them; but bishops and presiding elders had enough of the wisdom of serpents not to appoint those who would empty the seats, and drive these lambs of the flock to other and more gentle shepherds. Not in the churches only did these self-reliant Yankee girls act for themselves. It was at their peril that the factory corporations added half an hour to their time of work, or took sixpence from their weekly wages. The girls would turn out in processions, hold public meetings, make speeches and pass resolutions, and held the whole manufacturing interest at their mercy. Every mill was stopped; there were no other hands to be had; there was not a girl in New England would come to take their places. The managers had nothing to do but quietly knock under. The men took no part in these émeutes, except as sympathising spectators. And what could be done? I should like to see the magistrate who would read the Riot Act to four or five thousand Yankee girls, the police that would arrest, or the military that would charge upon them. So they had their own way in these matters, while they submitted without a murmur to the social regulations which were made for their benefit and protection. When General Jackson visited New England during his presidency, the Lowell factory-girls, all dressed in white, with wreaths of flowers, went out to meet him. They walked out two and two, under their own marshals-the tallest and loveliest girls from the white hills of New Hampshire, the green mountains of Vermont, and the lovely valleys of Massachusetts-with bands of music and songs of welcome for the old chieftain. When they met him, their leader made their patriotic address. The gallant old man thanked her, and kissed her for all the rest; and then, with his head bare to the mountain breezes, the sun shining on his silvery hair, the old veteran was driven between the two long files of white-robed girls all the way to the City of Spindles, whose mills were closed for a great holiday. The population of Lowell, aside from the factory-operatives, was small. There were the families of the agents, engineers, clerks; tradesmen, professional men, editors of newspapers; and the mechanics and labourers of a fast-growing city. After a lapse of nearly forty years, there is but one family that I can vividly remember. It was that of a retired Methodist preacher, who lived in a pretty white cottage on the banks of a small river, in what was then a suburb of the town, with a family of four children-two sons and two daughters, of fifteen to twenty-five. The young ladies were two of the most beautiful, intellectual, and amiable girls I ever knew. The young men were handsome, energetic, enterprising, and intelligent. The fortunes of these four young people were those of thousands of Americans, and curiously illustrate the character of the country. The eldest son studied law, removed to New Orleans, married a lady who owned large plantations on the Red River, became a member of the United States Congress, and in 1861 was a leading statesman of the Confederacy. The second son became an engineer, invented machinery and firearms, and the last I heard of him, he was at Washington, a strong Union man, contracting to supply an improved rifle, to shoot his rebel relations. The two girls-who went to visit their elder brother in Louisiana-both married rich planters there. Just as the war broke out in 1861, and before the mails were stopped, I received a letter from the elder sister. I knew her handwriting, though she signed a strange Creole name, and I had not seen or heard directly from her for twenty-five years; and now, just as the horrible war was beginning, she wrote to me with the fervour of the sweet friendship of our early days. She had been married, and was a widow. Her eldest son had just gone to college. The country all round her was flying to arms. There was but one feeling with men and women, old and young-the determination to repel invasion and be independent of the hated North. I could form no idea, she said, of the unanimity or intensity of this feeling. As she wrote, a steamer was passing down the Red River to the Mississippi with a regiment en route for the seat of war-one of those Southern regiments, not made up of foreigners, mercenaries, or outcasts, but in which fathers, sons, and brothers were banded to fight and die for country and home. On the steamer were twenty-five women-mothers, wives, and sisters of the regiment at work, with seven sewing-machines to help them, making up uniforms on the passage, that those they loved might lose no time in meeting the invader. "Can such people as these," she asked, "ever be conquered"? She lived to see the capital of her own adopted State burned and plundered; to see New Orleans under the rule of Gen. Butler, a lawyer from this very town of Lowell, where she formerly resided; to see the southern portion of Louisiana ravaged by Gen. Banks, formerly a Massachusetts shoemaker. Perhaps her own plantation was plundered, her servants scattered, her dwelling given to the flames; and she had the bitterness of knowing that one of her brothers was a Northern partizan, supplying, perhaps, the very arms that might slay her |