I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went
before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had
about those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for
the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized
to molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that I
went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their
whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the
bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to
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