My grandfather came to see my mother once at about this time and visited the mills.When he had entered our room,and looked around for a moment,he took off his hat and made a low bow to the girls,first toward the right,and then toward the left.We were familiar with his courteous habits,partly due to his French descent;but we had never seen anybody bow to a room full of mill girls in that polite way,and some one of the family afterwards asked him why he did so.He looked a little surprised at the question,but answered promptly and with dignity,"I always take off my hat to ladies."His courtesy was genuine.Still,we did not call ourselves ladies.We did not forget that we were working-girls,wearing coarse aprons suitable to our work,and that there was some danger of our becoming drudges.I know that sometimes the confinement of the mill became very wearisome to me.In the sweet June weather I would lean far out of the window,and try not to hear the unceasing clash of sound inside.Looking away to the hills,my whole stifled being would cry out "Oh,that I had wings!"Still I was there from choice,and "The prison unto which we doom ourselves,No prison is."And I was every day making discoveries about life,and about myself.I had naturally some elements of the recluse,and would never,of my own choice,have lived in a crowd.I loved quiet-ness.The noise of machinery was particularly distasteful to me.
But I found that the crowd was made up of single human lives,not one of them wholly uninteresting,when separately known.Ilearned also that there are many things which belong to the whole world of us together,that no one of us,nor any few of us,can claim or enjoy for ourselves alone.I discovered,too,that Icould so accustom myself to the noise that it became like a silence to me.And I defied the machinery to make me its slave.
Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.Even the long hours,the early rising and the regularity enforced by the cladgor of the bell were good discipline for one who was naturally inclined to dally and to dream,and who loved her own personal liberty with a willful rebellion against control.Perhaps I could have brought myself into the limitations of order and method in no other way.
Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow,it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me most good.
But when I was sincerest with myself,as also when I thought least about it,I know that I was glad to be alive,and to be just where I was.
It is a conquest when we can lift ourselves above the annoyances of circumstances over which we have no control;but it is a greater victory when we can make those circumstances our helpers,when we can appreciate the good there is in them.It has often seemed to me as if Life stood beside me,looking me in the face,and saying,"Child,you must learn to like me in the form in which you see me,before I can offer myself to you in any other aspect."It was so with this disagreeable necessity of living among many people.There is nothing more miserable than to lose the feeling of our own distinctiveness,since that is our only clue to the Purpose behind us and the End before us.But when we have discovered that human beings are not a mere "mass,"but an orderly Whole,of which we are a part,it is all so different!
This we working-girls might have learned from the webs of cloth we saw woven around us.Every little thread must take its place as warp or woof,and keep in it steadily.Left to itself,it would be only a loose,useless filament.Trying to wander in an independent or a disconnected way among the other threads,it would make of the whole web an inextricable snarl.Yet each little thread must be as firmly spun as if it were the only one,or the result would be a worthless fabric.
That we are entirely separate,while yet we entirely belong to the Whole,is a truth that we learn to rejoice in,as we come to understand more and more of ourselves,and of this human life of ours,which seems so complicated,and yet is so simple.And when we once get a glimpse of the Divine Plan in it all,and know that to be just where we are,doing just what we are doing just at this hour because it is our appointed hour,--when we become aware that this is the very best thing possible for us in God's universe,the hard task grows easy,the tiresome employment welcome and delightful.Having fitted ourselves to our present work in such a way as this,we are usually prepared for better work,and are sent to take a better place.
Perhaps this is one of the unfailing laws of progress in our being.Perhaps the Master of Life always rewards those who do their little faithfully by giving them some greater opportunity for faithfulness.Certainly,it is a comfort,wherever we are,to say to ourselves:--"Thou camest not to thy place by accident,It is the very place God meant for thee."
