me the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the
captivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right and well
for me to be standing by,

"With sick and scornful looks averse,"

while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my
pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the
sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no
sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and
watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no
concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and
with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours' work
a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they
rested from their toil.

I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord,
past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and
through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the
summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage
in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and
up to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the
intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other
fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness
which I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newly
mown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows
among the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it
had been gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent
farms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with
a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and