ample opportunity to compare domestic service with factory work. We set
the table for two hundred, and do a thousand miserable slavish tasks
that must be begun again the following day. At twelve the two hundred
troop in, toil-worn and begrimed. They pass like locusts, leaving us
sixteen hundred dirty dishes to wash up and wipe. This takes us four
hours, and when we have finished the work stands ready to be done over
the next morning with peculiar monotony. In the factory there is
stimulus in feeling that the material which passes through one's hands
will never be seen or heard of again.

On Saturday the owner of the factory comes at lunch time with several
friends and talks to us with an amazing _camaraderie_. He is kindly,
humourous and tactful. One or two missionaries speak after him, but
their conversation is too abstract for us. We want something dramatic,
imaginative, to hold our attention, or something wholly natural. Tell us
about the bees, the beavers or the toilers of the sea. The longing for
flowers has often come to me as I work, and a rose seems of all things
the most desirable. In my present condition I do not hark back to
civilized wants, but repeatedly my mind travels toward the country
places I have seen in the fields and forests. If I had a holiday I would
spend it seeing not what man but what God has made. These are the things
to be remembered in addressing or trying to amuse or instruct girls who
are no more prepared than I felt myself to be for any preconceived ideal
of art or ethics. The omnipresence of dirt and ugliness, of machines and
"stock," leave the mind in a state of lassitude which should be roused
by something natural. As an initial remedy for the ills I voluntarily
assumed I would propose amusement. Of all the people who spoke to us
that Saturday, we liked best the one who made us laugh. It was a relief
to hear something funny. In working as an outsider in a factory girls'
club I had always held that nothing was so important as to give the poor