far as I could see. I suppose she was what might be called a
broken-hearted woman.

This went on until I was thirteen years old. I was little and not very
strong, and had a cough, caused, perhaps, by the hard steady work, and
the lint in the air of the factory. There were a good many cases every
year of the working people there going into declines and dying of
consumption; so my mother had taken me out of the factory every time
Rucker went away, and tried to make me play. It was so in all the
factories in those days, I guess. I did not feel like playing, and had
no playmates; but I used to go down by the canal and watch the boats go
back and forth. Sometimes the captains of the boats would ask me if I
didn't want a job driving; but I scarcely knew what they meant. I must
have been a very backward child, and I surely was a scared and conquered
one. I used to sit on a stump by the tow-path, and so close to it that
the boys driving the mules or horses drawing the boats could almost
strike me with their whips, which they often tried to do as they went
by. Then I would scuttle back into the brush and hide. There was a lock
just below, but I seldom went to it because all the drivers were egged
on to fight each other during the delay at the locks, and the canallers
would have been sure to set them on me for the fun of seeing a fight.

On the most eventful evening of my life, perhaps. I sat on this stump,
watching a boat which, after passing me, was slowing down and stopping.
I heard the captain swearing at some one, and saw him come ashore and
start back along the tow-path toward me as if looking for something. He
was a tall man whom I had seen pass at other times, and I was wondering
whether he would speak to me or not, when I felt somebody's hand snatch
at my collar, and a whip came down over my thin shirt with a cut which
as I write I seem to feel yet. It was John Rucker, coming home when we