Shakespeare.
SALOME SHEPARD, REFORMER.
I.
Salome Shepard gazed wonderingly at the crowd of people in the street, as she guided her pony-phaeton through the factory precincts.
“What can be the matter with these people?” she thought. “I’m sure they ought to have gone to their work before this.”
It was a wet October day. The narrow street was slippery with the muddy water that oozed along to the gutters. The factory boardinghouses loomed up on either side, dingy and desolate. Even the mills looked larger and coarser, in the gloomy air of the morning.
As she drove by them, the fair owner listened in vain for the rumble of machinery. Inside, the great, well-lighted rooms looked dreary and barn-like in the gray mist that struggled through the windows.
One hour before, the machinery, shrieking and groaning, had voiced the protest of the “hands” against their fancied and their real wrongs. One hour before, every employe had been in his or her place. But the gloom of the atmosphere could not obscure the suppressed excitement of the morning. Shortsighted and blind to their best interest, they might have been; but there was not a man among them who did not feel a tremendous underlying principle at stake.
And so, at precisely ten o’clock, the machinery had suddenly and mysteriously stopped, and every man, woman and child, without a word, had left the mills.
All this had happened while Salome Shepard was calling on an elderly friend of her mother’s at the other end of the town. It had been a delightfully cosy morning in spite of the rain; and, after a gossipy fashion, they had passed it in discussing, as women will, the newest pattern of crochet, the last society-novel, the coming concerts in town.